## Reading the Comics, July 14, 2018: County Fair Edition

The title doesn’t mean anything. My laptop’s random-draw of pictures pulled up one from the county fair last year is all. I’m just working too close to deadline to have a good one. Pet rabbit has surgery scheduled and we are hoping that turns out well for everyone involved.

Jeffrey Caulfield and Alexandre Rouillard’s Mustard and Boloney for the 12th has the blackboard of mathematical symbols. Familiar old shorthand of conflating mathematics ability with genius, or at least intelligence. The blackboard isn’t particularly full of expressions, possibly because Caulfield and Rouillard’s art might not be able to render too much detail clearly. It’s also got a sort-of appearance of Einstein’s most famous equation. Although with perhaps an extra joke to it. Suppose we’re to take ‘E’ and ‘M’ and ‘C’ to mean what they do in Einstein’s use. Then $E - mc^2$ has to equal zero. And there are many things you can safely do with zero. Dividing by it, though, isn’t one. I shan’t guess whether Caulfield and Rouillard were being that sly, though.

Marty Links’s Emmy Lou rerun for the 13th tries to be a paradox. How can one like mathematics without liking figures? But arithmetic is just one part of mathematics. Surely the most-used part, if we go by real-world utility. But not everything. Arithmetic is often useful, yes. But you can do good work in (say) logic or knot theory or geometry with only a slight ability to add or subtract or multiply. There’s not enough emphasis put on that in early education. I suppose it reflects the reasonable feeling that people do need to be competent at arithmetic, which is useful. But it gives one a distorted view of what mathematics can be.

Mark Parisi’s Off The Markfor the 13th is the anthropomorphic numerals joke for the week. And it presents being multiplied by zero as a terrifying fate for other numbers. This seems to reflect the idea that being multiplied by zero is equivalent to being made into nothing. That it’s being killed. Zero enjoys this dual meaning, culturally, representing both a number and the concept of a thing that doesn’t exist and the concept of non-existence. If being turned from one number to another is a numeral murder, then a 2 sneaking in with a + sign would be at least as horrifying. But that joke wouldn’t work, and I know that too.

Olivia Jaimes’s Nancy for the 14th is another recreational-mathematics puzzle. I know nothing of Jaimes’s background but apparently it involves a keen interest in that kind of play that either makes someone love or hate mathematics. (Myself, I’m only slightly interested in these kinds of puzzles, most of the time.) This one — add one line to ‘fix’ the equation 5 + 5 + 5 + 5 = 555 — I hadn’t encountered before. Took some fuming to work it out. The obvious answer, of course, is to add a slash across the = sign so that it means “does not equal”.

But that answer’s dull. What mathematicians like are statements that are true and interesting. There are many things that 5 + 5 + 5 + 5 does not equal. Why single out 555 from that set? So negating the equals sign meets the specifications of the problem, slightly better than Nancy does herself. It doesn’t have the surprise of the answer Nancy’s teacher wants.

If you don’t get how to do it, highlight over the paragraph below for a hint.

There are actually three ways to add the stroke to make this equation true. The three ways are equivalent, though. Notice that the symbols on the board comprise strokes and curves and consider that the meaning of the symbol can be changed by altering the composition of those strokes and curves.

Ted Shearer’s Quincy for the 21st of May, 1979, and rerun the 14th is a joke about making mathematics problems relevant. And, yeah, I’ll give Mrs Glover credit for making problems that reflect stuff students know they’re going to have to deal with. Also that they may have already dealt with and so have some feeling for what plausible answers will be. It’s tough to find many problems like that which don’t repeat themselves too much. (“If your pants need a new patch every two months how many would you have in three years?”).

I do many Reading the Comics posts. Others like this one are here. For other essays that mention Mustard and Boloney, look to this link. I admit I’m surprised there’s anything there; I didn’t remember having written about it before For other discussions of Emmy Lou, try this link. For this and other times I’ve written about Off The Mark try this link. For Nancy content, try this link. And for other Quincy essays you can read this link. Thank you.

## Reading the Comics, September 22, 2017: Doughnut-Cutting Edition

The back half of last week’s mathematically themed comic strips aren’t all that deep. They make up for it by being numerous. This is how calculus works, so, good job, Comic Strip Master Command. Here’s what I have for you.

Mark Anderson’s Andertoons for the 20th marks its long-awaited return to these Reading The Comics posts. It’s of the traditional form of the student misunderstanding the teacher’s explanations. Arithmetic edition.

Marty Links’s Emmy Lou for the 20th was a rerun from the 22nd of September, 1976. It’s just a name-drop. It’s not like it matters for the joke which textbook was lost. I just include it because, what the heck, might as well.

Jef Mallett’s Frazz for the 21st uses the form of a story problem. It’s a trick question anyway; there’s really no way the Doppler effect is going to make an ice cream truck’s song unrecognizable, not even at highway speeds. Too distant to hear, that’s a possibility. Also I don’t know how strictly regional this is but the ice cream trucks around here have gone in for interrupting the music every couple seconds with some comical sound effect, like a “boing” or something. I don’t know what this hopes to achieve besides altering the timeline of when the ice cream seller goes mad.

Mark Litzler’s Joe Vanilla for the 21st I already snuck in here last week, in talking about ‘x’. The variable does seem like a good starting point. And, yeah, hypothesis block is kind of a thing. There’s nothing quite like staring at a problem that should be interesting and having no idea where to start. This happens even beyond grade school and the story problems you do then. What to do about it? There’s never one thing. Study it a good while, read about related problems a while. Maybe work on something that seems less obscure a while. It’s very much like writer’s block.

Ryan North’s Dinosaur Comics rerun for the 22nd straddles the borders between mathematics, economics, and psychology. It’s a problem about making forecasts about other people’s behavior. It’s a mystery of game theory. I don’t know a proper analysis for this game. I expect it depends on how many rounds you get to play: if you have a sense of what people typically do, you can make a good guess of what they will do. If everyone gets a single shot to play, all kinds of crazy things might happen.

Jef Mallet’s Frazz gets in again on the 22nd with some mathematics gibberish-talk, including some tossing around of the commutative property. Among other mistakes Caulfield was making here, going from “less is more to therefore more is less” isn’t commutation. Commutation is about binary operations, where you match a pair of things to a single thing. The operation commutes if it never matters what the order of the pair of things is. It doesn’t commute if it ever matters, even a single time, what the order is. Commutativity gets introduced in arithmetic where there are some good examples of the thing. Addition and multiplication commute. Subtraction and division don’t. From there it gets forgotten until maybe eventually it turns up in matrix multiplication, which doesn’t commute. And then it gets forgotten once more until maybe group theory. There, whether operations commute or not is as important a divide as the one between vertebrates and invertebrates. But I understand kids not getting why they should care about commuting. Early on it seems like a longwinded way to say what’s obvious about addition.

Michael Cavna’s Warped for the 22nd is the Venn Diagram joke for this round of comics.

Bud Blake’s Tiger rerun for the 23rd starts with a real-world example of your classic story problem. I like the joke in it, and I also like Hugo’s look of betrayal and anger in the second panel. A spot of expressive art will do so good for a joke.

## Reading the Comics, August 12, 2017: August 10 and 12 Edition

The other half of last week’s comic strips didn’t have any prominent pets in them. The six of them appeared on two days, though, so that’s as good as a particular theme. There’s also some π talk, but there’s enough of that I don’t want to overuse Pi Day as an edition name.

Mark Anderson’s Andertoons for the 10th is a classroom joke. It’s built on a common problem in teaching by examples. The student can make the wrong generalization. I like the joke. There’s probably no particular reason seven was used as the example number to have zero interact with. Maybe it just sounded funnier than the other numbers under ten that might be used.

Mike Baldwin’s Cornered for the 10th uses a chalkboard of symbols to imply deep thinking. The symbols on the board look to me like they’re drawn from some real mathematics or physics source. There’s force equations appropriate for gravity or electric interactions. I can’t explain the whole board, but that’s not essential to work out anyway.

Marty Links’s Emmy Lou for the 17th of March, 1976 was rerun the 10th of August. It name-drops the mathematics teacher as the scariest of the set. Fortunately, Emmy Lou went to her classes in a day before Rate My Professor was a thing, so her teacher doesn’t have to hear about this.

Scott Hilburn’s The Argyle Sweater for the 12th is a timely remidner that Scott Hilburn has way more Pi Day jokes than we have Pi Days to have. Also he has octopus jokes. It’s up to you to figure out whether the etymology of the caption makes sense.

John Zakour and Scott Roberts’s Working Daze for the 12th presents the “accountant can’t do arithmetic” joke. People who ought to be good at arithmetic being lousy at figuring tips is an ancient joke. I’m a touch surprised that Christopher Miller’s American Cornball: A Laffopedic Guide to the Formerly Funny doesn’t have an entry for tips (or mathematics). But that might reflect Miller’s mission to catalogue jokes that have fallen out of the popular lexicon, not merely that are old.

Michael Cavna’s Warped for the 12th is also a Pi Day joke that couldn’t wait. It’s cute and should fit on any mathematics teacher’s office door.

## Reading the Comics, May 2, 2017: Puzzle Week

If there was a theme this week, it was puzzles. So many strips had little puzzles to work out. You’ll see. Thank you.

Bill Amend’s FoxTrot for the 30th of April tries to address my loss of Jumble panels. Thank you, whoever at Comic Strip Master Command passed along word of my troubles. I won’t spoil your fun. As sometimes happens with a Jumble you can work out the joke punchline without doing any of the earlier ones. 64 in binary would be written 1000000. And from this you know what fits in all the circles of the unscrambled numbers. This reduces a lot of the scrambling you have to do: just test whether 341 or 431 is a prime number. Check whether 8802, 8208, or 2808 is divisible by 117. The integer cubed you just have to keep trying possibilities. But only one combination is the cube of an integer. The factorial of 12, just, ugh. At least the circles let you know you’ve done your calculations right.

Steve McGarry’s activity feature Kidtown for the 30th plays with numbers some. And a puzzle that’ll let you check how well you can recognize multiples of four that are somewhere near one another. You can use diagonals too; that’s important to remember.

Mac King and Bill King’s Magic in a Minute feature for the 30th is also a celebration of numerals. Enjoy the brain teaser about why the encoding makes sense. I don’t believe the hype about NASA engineers needing days to solve a puzzle kids got in minutes. But if it’s believable, is it really hype?

Marty Links’s Emmy Lou from the 29th of October, 1963 was rerun the 2nd of May. It’s a reminder that mathematics teachers of the early 60s also needed something to tape to their doors.

Mel Henze’s Gentle Creatures rerun for the 2nd of May is another example of the conflating of “can do arithmetic” with “intelligence”.

Mark Litzler’s Joe Vanilla for the 2nd name-drops the Null Hypothesis. I’m not sure what Litzler is going for exactly. The Null Hypothesis, though, comes to us from statistics and from inference testing. It turns up everywhere when we sample stuff. It turns up in medicine, in manufacturing, in psychology, in economics. Everywhere we might see something too complicated to run the sorts of unambiguous and highly repeatable tests that physics and chemistry can do — things that are about immediately practical questions — we get to testing inferences. What we want to know is, is this data set something that could plausibly happen by chance? Or is it too far out of the ordinary to be mere luck? The Null Hypothesis is the explanation that nothing’s going on. If your sample is weird in some way, well, everything is weird. What’s special about your sample? You hope to find data that will let you reject the Null Hypothesis, showing that the data you have is so extreme it just can’t plausibly be chance. Or to conclude that you fail to reject the Null Hypothesis, showing that the data is not so extreme that it couldn’t be chance. We don’t accept the Null Hypothesis. We just allow that more data might come in sometime later.

I don’t know what Litzler is going for with this. I feel like I’m missing a reference and I’ll defer to a finance blogger’s Reading the Comics post.

Keith Tutt and Daniel Saunders’s Lard’s World Peace Tips for the 3rd is another in the string of jokes using arithmetic as source of indisputably true facts. And once again it’s “2 + 2 = 5”. Somehow one plus one never rates in this use.

Aaron Johnson’s W T Duck rerun for the 3rd is the Venn Diagram joke for this week. It’s got some punch to it, too.

Je Mallett’s Frazz for the 5th took me some time to puzzle out. I’ll allow it.