Reading the Comics, May 2, 2020: What Is The Cosine Of Six Edition

The past week was a light one for mathematically-themed comic strips. So let’s see if I can’t review what’s interesting about them before the end of this genially dumb movie (1940’s Hullabaloo, starring Frank Morgan and featuring Billie Burke in a small part). It’ll be tough; they’re reaching a point where the characters start acting like they care about the plot either, which is usually the sign they’re in the last reel.

Patrick Roberts’s Todd the Dinosaur for the 26th of April presents mathematics homework as the most dreadful kind of homework.

Jenny Campbell’s Flo and Friends for the 26th is a joke about fumbling a bit of practical mathematics, in this case, cutting a recipe down. When I look into arguments about the metric system, I will sometimes see the claim that English traditional units are advantageous for cutting down a recipe: it’s quite easy to say that half of “one cup” is a half cup, for example. I doubt that this is much more difficult than working out what half of 500 ml is, and my casual inquiries suggest that nobody has the faintest idea what half of a pint would be. And anyway none of this would help Ruthie’s problem, which is taking two-fifths of a recipe meant for 15 people. … Honestly, I would have just cut it in half and wonder who’s publishing recipes that serve 15.

Ed Bickford and Aaron Walther’s American Chop Suey for the 28th of April, 2020. I don’t seem to have ever written about this strip before, which does not surprise me. So I have a new tag, then. This and any future essays about American Chop Suey should appear at this link.

Ed Bickford and Aaron Walther’s American Chop Suey for the 28th uses a panel of (gibberish) equations to represent deep thinking. It’s in part of a story about an origami competition. This interests me because there is serious mathematics to be done in origami. Most of these are geometry problems, as you might expect. The kinds of things you can understand about distance and angles from folding a square may surprise. For example, it’s easy to trisect an arbitrary angle using folded squares. The problem is, famously, impossible for compass-and-straightedge geometry.

Origami offers useful mathematical problems too, though. (In practice, if we need to trisect an angle, we use a protractor.) It’s good to know how to take a flat, or nearly flat, thing and unfold it into a more interesting shape. It’s useful whenever you have something that needs to be transported in as few pieces as possible, but that on site needs to not be flat. And this connects to questions with pleasant and ordinary-seeming names like the map-folding problem: can you fold a large sheet into a small package that’s still easy to open? Often you can. So, the mathematics of origami is a growing field, and one that’s about an accessible subject.

Nate Fakes’s Break of Day for the 29th is the anthropomorphic-symbols joke for the week, with an x talking about its day job in equations and its free time in games like tic-tac-toe.

Bill Holbrook’s On The Fastrack for the 2nd of May also talks about the use of x as a symbol. Curt takes eagerly to the notion that a symbol can represent any number, whether we know what it is or not. And, also, that the choice of symbol is arbitrary; we could use whatever symbol communicates. I remember getting problems to work in which, say, 3 plus a box equals 8 and working out what number in the box would make the equation true. This is exactly the same work as solving 3 + x = 8. Using an empty box made the problem less intimidating, somehow.

Dave Whamond’s Reality Check for the 2nd of May, 2020. Essays discussing something mentioned in Reality Check are gathered at this link.

Dave Whamond’s Reality Check for the 2nd is, really, a bit baffling. It has a student asking Siri for the cosine of 174 degrees. But it’s not like anyone knows the cosine of 174 degrees off the top of their heads. If the cosine of 174 degrees wasn’t provided in a table for the students, then they’d have to look it up. Well, more likely they’d be provided the cosine of 6 degrees; the cosine of an angle is equal to minus one times the cosine of 180 degrees minus that same angle. This allows table-makers to reduce how much stuff they have to print. Still, it’s not really a joke that a student would look up something that students would be expected to look up.

… That said …

If you know anything about trigonometry, you know the sine and cosine of a 30-degree angle. If you know a bit about trigonometry, and are willing to put in a bit of work, you can start from a regular pentagon and work out the sine and cosine of a 36-degree angle. And, again if you know anything about trigonometry, you know that there are angle-addition and angle-subtraction formulas. That is, if you know the cosine of two angles, you can work out the cosine of the difference between them.

So, in principle, you could start from scratch and work out the cosine of 6 degrees without using a calculator. And the cosine of 174 degrees is minus one times the cosine of 6 degrees. So it could be a legitimate question to work out the cosine of 174 degrees without using a calculator. I can believe in a mathematics class which has that as a problem. But that requires such an ornate setup that I can’t believe Whamond intended that. Who in the readership would think the cosine of 174 something to work out by hand? If I hadn’t read a book about spherical trigonometry last month I wouldn’t have thought the cosine of 6 a thing someone could reasonably work out by hand.

I didn’t finish writing before the end of the movie, even though it took about eighteen hours to wrap up ten minutes of story. My love came home from a walk and we were talking. Anyway, this is plenty of comic strips for the week. When there are more to write about, I’ll try to have them in an essay at this link. Thanks for reading.

Reading the Comics, September 21, 2019: Filling Out The Week, Part 1 Edition

There were a couple more comic strips than made a good fit in yesterday’s recap. Here’s the two that I had much to write about.

Jason Poland’s Robbie and Bobby for the 18th is another rerun. I mentioned it back in December of 2016. Zeno’s Paradoxical Pasta plays on the most famous of Zeno’s Paradoxes, about how to get to a place one has to get halfway there, but to get halfway there requires getting halfway to halfway. This goes on in infinite regression. The paradox is not a failure to understand that we can get to a place, or finish swallowing a noodle.

Jason Poland’s Robbie and Bobby rerun for the 18th of September, 2019. This is another strip I’m gathering has lapsed into perpetual reruns, so might drop it. But essays featuring Robbie and Bobby should be at this link.

Zach Weinersmith’s Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal for the 21st gets that strip back to my attention after, like, days out of it. It’s a logic joke, as promised, and that’s mathematics enough for me. Of course the risk of dying from a lightning strike has to be even lower than the risk of being struck by lightning.

Zach Weinersmith’s Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal for the 21st of September, 2019. I too am surprised it’s been almost a month since an essay with Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, as gathered at this link. But then Andertoons went missing for like four months in 2018. All sorts of things will happen and we’re not ready for any of them.

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And then there were comic strips that are just of too slight mathematical content for me to go into at length. Several of them all ran on the same day, the 15th of September. Let me give you them.

Jenny Campbell’s Flo and Friends has a couple senior citizens remembering mathematics lessons from their youth. And getting oddly smug about doing it without calculators.

Richard Thompson’s Richard’s Poor Almanac reruns a mention of infinite monkey authorship. Always fun, to my way of thinking.

Samson’s Dark Side of the Horse was the Roman Numerals joke for the week.

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And that’s enough for just now. I expect to finish off the casual mentions with a Wednesday Reading the Comics post. The A to Z series should have ‘G’ tomorrow. And I’m still open for suggestions for the letters I through N. Thank you for reading.

Reading the Comics, April 18, 2019: Slow But Not Stopped Week Edition

The first, important, thing is that I have not disappeared or done something worse. I just had one of those weeks where enough was happening that something had to give. I could either write up stuff for my mathematics blog, or I could feel guilty about not writing stuff up for my mathematics blog. Since I didn’t have time to do both, I went with feeling guilty about not writing, instead. I’m hoping this week will give me more writing time, but I am fooling only myself.

Second is that Comics Kingdom has, for all my complaining, gotten less bad in the redesign. Mostly in that the whole comics page loads at once, now, instead of needing me to click to “load more comics” every six strips. Good. The strips still appear in weird random orders, especially strips like Prince Valiant that only run on Sundays, but still. I can take seeing a vintage Boner’s Ark Sunday strip six unnecessary times. The strips are still smaller than they used to be, and they’re not using the decent, three-row format that they used to. And the archives don’t let you look at a week’s worth in one page. But it’s less bad, and isn’t that all we can ever hope for out of the Internet anymore?

And finally, Comic Strip Master Command wanted to make this an easy week for me by not having a lot to write about. It got so light I’ve maybe overcompensated. I’m not sure I have enough to write about here, but, I don’t want to completely vanish either.

Dave Whamond’s Reality Check for the 15th of April, 2019. Appearances in these pages of Reality Check should be gathered at this link.

Dave Whamond’s Reality Check for the 15th is … hm. Well, it’s not an anthropomorphic-numerals joke. It is some kind of wordplay, making concrete a common phrase about, and attitude toward, numbers. I could make the fussy difference between numbers and numerals here but I’m not sure anyone has the patience for that.

Zach Weinersmith’s Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal for the 17th of April, 2019. I am surprised that this is the first time this strip has drawn a mention this month. Well, this and other Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal posts are at this link.

Zach Weinersmith’s Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal for the 17th touches around mathematics without, I admit, necessarily saying anything specific. The angel(?) welcoming the man to heaven mentions creating new systems of mathematics as some fit job for the heavenly host. The discussion of creating self-consistent physics systems seems mathematical in nature too. I’m not sure whether saying one could “attempt” to create self-consistent physics is meant to imply that our universe’s physics are not self-consistent. To create a “maximally complex reality using the simplest possible constructions” seems like a mathematical challenge as well. There are important fields of mathematics built on optimizing, trying to create the most extreme of one thing subject to some constraints or other.

I think the strip’s premise is the old, partially a joke, concept that God is a mathematician. This would explain why the angel(?) seems to rate doing mathematics or mathematics-related projects as so important. But even then … well, consider. There’s nothing about designing new systems of mathematics that ordinary mortals can’t do. Creating new physics or new realities is beyond us, certainly, but designing the rules for such seems possible. I think I understood this comic better then I had thought about it less. Maybe including it in this column has only made trouble for me.

Doug Savage’s Savage Chickens for the 17th of April, 2019. Essays inspired by something from Savage Chickens should be at this link.

Doug Savage’s Savage Chickens for the 17th amuses me by making a strip out of a logic paradox. It’s not quite your “this statement is a lie” paradox, but it feels close to that, to me. To have the first chicken call it “Birthday Paradox” also teases a familiar probability problem. It’s not a true paradox. It merely surprises people who haven’t encountered the problem before. This would be the question of how many people you need to have in a group before there’s a 50 percent (75 percent, 99 percent, whatever you like) chance of at least one pair sharing a birthday.

And I notice on Wikipedia a neat variation of this birthday problem. This generalization considers splitting people into two distinct groups, and how many people you need in each group to have a set chance of a pair, one person from each group, sharing a birthday. Apparently both a 32-person group of 16 women and 16 men, or a 49-person group of 43 women and six men, have a 50% chance of some woman-man pair sharing a birthday. Neat.

Mark Parisi’s Off The Mark for the 18th of April, 2019. And essays inspired by Off The Mark should appear at this link.

Mark Parisi’s Off The Mark for the 18th sports a bit of wordplay. It’s built on how multiplication and division also have meanings in biology. … If I’m not mis-reading my dictionary, “multiply” meant any increase in number first, and the arithmetic operation we now call multiplication afterwards. Division, similarly, meant to separate into parts before it meant the mathematical operation as well. So it might be fairer to say that multiplication and division are words that picked up mathematical meaning.

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And if you thought this week’s pickings had slender mathematical content? Jef Mallett’s Frazz, for the 19th, just mentioned mathematics homework. Well, there were a couple of quite slight jokes the previous week too, that I never mentioned. Jenny Campbell’s Flo and Friends for the 8th did a Roman numerals joke. The rerun of Richard Thompson’s Richard’s Poor Almanac for the 11th had the Platonic Fir Christmas tree, rendered as a geometric figure. I’ve discussed the connotations of that before.

And there we are. I hope to have some further writing this coming week. But if all else fails my next Reading the Comics essay, like all of them, should be at this link.

Reading the Comics, October 6, 2018: Curve Edition

There’s three more comics from last week I want to talk about. To ease my workload I’m going to put those off until Saturday. This is not an attempt to inflate the number of posts I make so that I can do a post-a-day-for-a-month again, as has happened in previous A-to-Z series. I already missed yesterday anyway. I just didn’t have time to think of things to write about six comics yesterday.

Morrie Turner’s Wee Pals for the 3rd has an interesting description of a circle. Definitions are a big part of mathematical work. This is especially so as we tend to think of mathematical objects as things that relate to one another in different ways. You want a definition that includes the relationships that are important, and excludes the ones you don’t want.

Morrie Turner’s Wee Pals for the 3rd of October, 2018. It previously ran the 9th of October, 2013. I suspect the strip was a rerun even in 2013, as the lines are pretty tightly drawn; other strips around that era were much more erratic. Also in 2013 I don’t seem to have thought this strip worth mention, which shows how standards are mutating around these parts.

Nipper’s definition of a circle … well, eh. I wouldn’t say that captures a circle. A ‘closed smooth curve’, yes. It’s closed because the ends join up. It’s smooth because there aren’t any corners, any kinks in it. It’s a curve because … well, there you go. There are many interesting shapes that are closed smooth curves. You can find some by tossing a rubber band in the air and seeing what it looks like when it lands. But I think what most people find important about circles are ideas like all the points on a curve being the same distance from some single “center” point. Nipper would probably realize his definition didn’t work by experimenting. Try drawing shapes that meet the rule he set out, but that aren’t what he thinks a circle ought to be.

This can be fruitful. It can develop a sharper idea of what a definition ought to have. Or it might force you to accept, in order to get the cases you want included, that something which seems wrong has to count too. This mathematicians faced in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. We learned that the best definition we’ve had for an idea like “a continuous function” means we have to allow weird conclusions, like that it’s possible to have a function continuous at a single point and nowhere else. But any other definition rules out things we absolutely have to call continuous, so, what’s there to do?

Jenny Campbell’s Flo and Friends for the 4th of October, 2018. I’m not sure which friend Flo is speaking with here; Wikipedia suggests either Ruthie or Winnie most likely. So if I may summarize: cast lists. Why do we not have them? Thank you.

Jenny Campbell’s Flo and Friends for the 4th presents algebra as one of the burdens of youth. And one that’s so harsh that it makes old age more pleasant. I get the unpleasantness of being stuck in a class one doesn’t understand or like. But my own slight experience with that thing where you wake up, and a thing hurts, and there’s no good reason but eventually it either goes away or you get so used to it you don’t realize it still actually hurts? I would take the boring class, most of the time.

John Zakour and Scott Roberts’s Maria’s Day for the 4th of October, 2018. All right, so she got the questions right, but we can see she didn’t write her name at the top of the page. Please, please, PLEASE make sure you put your name on the page. Every page, too. It’s so very stressful for your instructor to have to figure out which of the three anonymous papers are which.

John Zakour and Scott Roberts’s Maria’s Day for the 4th is a joke about how hard mathematics is. Maria’s finding the monsters in her room less frightening than arithmetic. Well, as long as she’s picking up a couple useful things about multiplication.

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I do at least one Reading the Comics post per week, and often two.They’ll be at this link. Other appearances by Wee Pals should be at this link. Topics raised by Flo and Friends are discussed at this link. And essays mentioning Maria’s Day are at this link. Thanks as ever for reading. I’m trusting that you did, or you wouldn’t be seeing this.

Reading the Comics, February 23, 2017: The Week At Once Edition

For the first time in ages there aren’t enough mathematically-themed comic strips to justify my cutting the week’s roundup in two. No, I have no idea what I’m going to write about for Thursday. Let’s find out together.

Jenny Campbell’s Flo and Friends for the 19th faintly irritates me. Flo wants to make sure her granddaughter understands that just because it takes people on average 14 minutes to fall asleep doesn’t mean that anyone actually does, by listing all sorts of reasons that a person might need more than fourteen minutes to sleep. It makes me think of a behavior John Allen Paulos notes in Innumeracy, wherein the statistically wise points out that someone has, say, a one-in-a-hundred-million chance of being killed by a terrorist (or whatever) and is answered, “ah, but what if you’re that one?” That is, it’s a response that has the form of wisdom without the substance. I notice Flo doesn’t mention the many reasons someone might fall asleep in less than fourteen minutes.

But there is something wise in there nevertheless. For most stuff, the average is the most common value. By “the average” I mean the arithmetic mean, because that is what anyone means by “the average” unless they’re being difficult. (Mathematicians acknowledge the existence of an average called the mode, which is the most common value (or values), and that’s most common by definition.) But just because something is the most common result does not mean that it must be common. Toss a coin fairly a hundred times and it’s most likely to come up tails 50 times. But you shouldn’t be surprised if it actually turns up tails 51 or 49 or 45 times. This doesn’t make 50 a poor estimate for the average number of times something will happen. It just means that it’s not a guarantee.

Gary Wise and Lance Aldrich’s Real Life Adventures for the 19th shows off an unusually dynamic camera angle. It’s in service for a class of problem you get in freshman calculus: find the longest pole that can fit around a corner. Oh, a box-spring mattress up a stairwell is a little different, what with box-spring mattresses being three-dimensional objects. It’s the same kind of problem. I want to say the most astounding furniture-moving event I’ve ever seen was when I moved a fold-out couch down one and a half flights of stairs single-handed. But that overlooks the caged mouse we had one winter, who moved a Chinese finger-trap full of crinkle paper up the tight curved plastic to his nest by sheer determination. The trap was far longer than could possibly be curved around the tube. We have no idea how he managed it.

J R Faulkner’s Promises, Promises for the 20th jokes that one could use Roman numerals to obscure calculations. So you could. Roman numerals are terrible things for doing arithmetic, at least past addition and subtraction. This is why accountants and mathematicians abandoned them pretty soon after learning there were alternatives.

Mark Anderson’s Andertoons for the 21st is the Mark Anderson’s Andertoons for the week. Probably anything would do for the blackboard problem, but something geometry reads very well.

Jef Mallett’s Frazz for the 21st makes some comedy out of the sort of arithmetic error we all make. It’s so easy to pair up, like, 7 and 3 make 10 and 8 and 2 make 10. It takes a moment, or experience, to realize 78 and 32 will not make 100. Forgive casual mistakes.

Bud Fisher’s Mutt and Jeff rerun for the 22nd is a similar-in-tone joke built on arithmetic errors. It’s got the form of vaudeville-style sketch compressed way down, which is probably why the third panel could be made into a satisfying final panel too.

Bud Blake’s Tiger for the 23rd of February, 2017. I want to blame the colorists for making Hugo’s baby tooth look so weird in the second and third panels, but the coloring is such a faint thing at that point I can’t. I’m sorry to bring it to your attention if you didn’t notice and weren’t bothered by it before.

Bud Blake’s Tiger rerun for the 23rd just name-drops mathematics; it could be any subject. But I need some kind of picture around here, don’t I?

Mike Baldwin’s Cornered for the 23rd is the anthropomorphic numerals joke for the week.