Reading the Comics, March 14, 2021: Pi Day Edition

I was embarrassed, on looking at old Pi Day Reading the Comics posts, to see how often I observed there were fewer Pi Day comics than I expected. There was not a shortage this year. This even though if Pi Day has any value it’s as an educational event, and there should be no in-person educational events while the pandemic is still on. Of course one can still do educational stuff remotely, mathematics especially. But after a year of watching teaching on screens and sometimes doing projects at home, it’s hard for me to imagine a bit more of that being all that fun.

But Pi Day being a Sunday did give cartoonists more space to explain what they’re talking about. This is valuable. It’s easy for the dreadfully online, like me, to forget that most people haven’t heard of Pi Day. Most people don’t have any idea why that should be a thing or what it should be about. This seems to have freed up many people to write about it. But — to write what? Let’s take a quick tour of my daily comics reading.

Tony Cochran’s Agnes for the 14th of March, 2021. My essays exploring something mentioned in Agnes appear at this link.

Tony Cochran’s Agnes starts with some talk about Daylight Saving Time. Agnes and Trout don’t quite understand how it works, and get from there to Pi Day. Or as Agnes says, Pie Day, missing the mathematics altogether in favor of the food.

Scott Hilburn’s The Argyle Sweater for the 14th of March, 2021. Essays featuring some discussion of The Argyle Sweater are at this link.

Scott Hilburn’s The Argyle Sweater is an anthropomorphic-numerals joke. It’s a bit risqué compared to the sort of thing you expect to see around here. The reflection of the numerals is correct, but it bothered me too.

Georgia Dunn’s Breaking Cat News for the 14th of March, 2021. I don’t seem to have ever discussed this strip before. This essay, and any future ones mentioning Breaking Cat News, should be at this link.

Georgia Dunn’s Breaking Cat News is a delightful cute comic strip. It doesn’t mention mathematics much. Here the cat reporters do a fine job explaining what Pi Day is and why everybody spent Sunday showing pictures of pies. This could almost be the standard reference for all the Pi Day strips.

Bill Amend’s FoxTrot for the 14th of March, 2021. Essays that have some mention of FoxTrot are gathered at this link.

Bill Amend’s FoxTrot is one of the handful that don’t mention pie at all. It focuses on representing the decimal digits of π. At least within the confines of something someone might write in the American dating system. The logic of it is a bit rough but if we’ve accepted 3-14 to represent 3.14, we can accept 1:59 as standing in for the 0.00159 of the original number. But represent 0.0015926 (etc) of a day however you like. If we accept that time is continuous, then there’s some moment on the 14th of March which matches that perfectly.

Jef Mallett’s Frazz for the 14th of March, 2021. Essays inspired by something in Frazz should be gathered at this link.

Jef Mallett’s Frazz talks about the eliding between π and pie for the 14th of March. The strip wonders a bit what kind of joke it is exactly. It’s a nerd pun, or at least nerd wordplay. If I had to cast a vote I’d call it a language gag. If they celebrated Pi Day in Germany, there would not be any comic strips calling it Tortentag.

Steenz’s Heart of the City for the 14th of March, 2021. Essays which mention Heart of the City — which until summer last year was written by Mark Tatulli, and is now by Steenz — are at this link.

Steenz’s Heart of the City is another of the pi-pie comics. I do feel for Heart’s bewilderment at hearing π explained at length. Also Kat’s desire to explain mathematics overwhelming her audience. It’s a feeling I struggle with too. The thing is it’s a lot of fun to explain things. It’s so much fun you can lose track whether you’re still communicating. If you set off one of these knowledge-floods from a friend? Try to hold on and look interested and remember any single piece anywhere of it. You are doing so much good for your friend. And if you realize you’re knowledge-flooding someone? Yeah, try not to overload them, but think about the things that are exciting about this. Your enthusiasm will communicate when your words do not.

Dave Whamond’s Reality Check for the 14th of March, 2021. Essays featuring something discussed in Reality Check are at this link.

Dave Whamond’s Reality Check is a pi-pie joke that doesn’t rely on actual pie. Well, there’s a small slice in the corner. It relies on the infinite length of the decimal representation of π. (Or its representation in any integer base.)

Michael Jantze’s Studio Jantze for the 15th of March, 2021. This is a new comic so there’s no old essays about it. But this and any future essays about Studio Jantze should appear at this link.

Michael Jantze’s Studio Jantze ran on Monday instead, although the caption suggests it was intended for Pi Day. So I’m including it here. And it’s the last of the strips sliding the day over to pie.

But there were a couple of comic strips with some mathematics mention that were not about Pi Day. It may have been coincidence.

Sandra Bell-Lundy’s Between Friends for the 14th of March, 2021. This and a bunch of other appearances of Venn Diagrams should be gathered under the Between Friends tag here.

Sandra Bell-Lundy’s Between Friends is of the “word problem in real life” kind. It’s a fair enough word problem, though, asking about how long something would take. From the premises, it takes a hair seven weeks to grow one-quarter inch, and it gets trimmed one quarter-inch every six weeks. It’s making progress, but it might be easier to pull out the entire grey hair. This won’t help things though.

Darby Conley’s Get Fuzzy for the 14th of March, 2021. Essays mentioning Get Fuzzy are gathered at this link.

Darby Conley’s Get Fuzzy is a rerun, as all Get Fuzzy strips are. It first (I think) ran the 13th of September, 2009. And it’s another Infinite Monkeys comic strip, built on how a random process should be able to create specific outcomes. As often happens when joking about monkeys writing Shakespeare, some piece of pop culture is treated as being easier. But for these problems the meaning of the content doesn’t count. Only the length counts. A monkey typing “let it be written in eight and eight” is as improbable as a monkey typing “yrg vg or jevggra va rvtug naq rvtug”. It’s on us that we find one of those more impressive than the other.

And this wraps up my Pi Day comic strips. I don’t promise that I’m back to reading the comics for their mathematics content regularly. But I have done a lot of it, and figure to do it again. All my Reading the Comics posts appear at this link. Thank you for reading and I hope you had some good pie.

I don’t know how Andertoons didn’t get an appearance here.

Reading the Comics, July 28, 2018: Command Performance Edition

One of the comics from the last half of last week is here mostly because Roy Kassinger asked if I was going to include it. Which one? Read on and see.

Scott Metzger’s The Bent Pinky for the 24th is the anthropomorphic-numerals joke for the week. It’s pretty easy to learn, or memorize, or test small numbers for whether they’re prime. The bigger a number gets the harder it is. Mostly it takes time. You can rule some numbers out easily enough. If they’re even numbers other than 2, for example. Or if their (base ten) digits add up to a multiple of three or nine. But once you’ve got past a couple easy filters … you don’t have to just try dividing them by all the prime numbers up to their square root. Comes close, though. Would save a lot of time if the numerals worked that out ahead of time and then kept the information around, in case it were needed. Seems a little creepy to be asking that of other numbers, really. Certainly to give special privileges to numbers for accidents of their creation.

Scott Metzger’s The Bent Pinky for the 24th of July, 2018. I’m curious whether the background customers were a 2 and a 3 because they do represent prime numbers, or whether they were just picked because they look good.

Tony Rubino and Gary Markstein’s Daddy’s Home for the 25th is an iteration of bad-at-arithmetic jokes. In this case there’s the arithmetic that’s counting, and there’s the arithmetic that’s the addition and subtraction demanded for checkbook-balancing.

Tony Rubino and Gary Markstein’s Daddy’s Home for the 25th of July, 2018. I don’t question the plausibility of people writing enough checks in 2018 that they need to balance them, even though my bank has been sold three times to new agencies before I’ve been able to use up one book of 25 checks. I do question whether people with the hobby of checkbook-balancing routinely do this outside, at the fence, while hanging out with the neighbor.

Wiley Miller’s Non Sequitur for the 25th is an Einstein joke. In a rare move for the breed this doesn’t have “E = mc²” in it, except in the implication that it was easier to think of than squirrel-proof bird feeders would be. Einstein usually gets acclaim for mathematical physics work. But he was also a legitimate inventor, with patents in his own right. He and his student Leó Szilárd developed a refrigerator that used no moving parts. Most refrigeration technology requires the use of toxic chemicals to actually do the cooling. Einstein and Szilárd hoped to make something less likely to leak these toxins. The design never saw widespread use. Ordinary refrigerators, using freon (shockingly harmless biologically, though dangerous to the upper atmosphere) got reliable enough that the danger of leaks got tolerable. And the electromagnetic pump the machine used instead made noise that at least some reports say was unbearable. The design as worked out also used a potassium-sodium alloy, not the sort of thing easy to work with. Now and then there’s talk of reviving the design. Its potential, as something that could use any heat source to provide refrigeration, seems neat. And everybody in this side of science and engineering wants to work on something that Einstein touched.

Wiley Miller’s Non Sequitur for the 25th of July, 2018. In fairness to the squirrels, they have to eat something as long as the raccoons are getting into the squirrel feeders.

Mort Walker and Greg Walker’s Beetle Bailey for the 26th is here by special request. I wasn’t sure it was on-topic enough for my usual rigorous standards. But there is some social-aspects-of-mathematics to it. The assumption that ‘five’ is naturally better than ‘four’ for example. There is the connotation that some numbers are better than others. Yes, there are famously lucky numbers like 7 or unlucky ones like 13 (in contemporary Anglo-American culture, anyway; others have different lucks). But there’s also the sense that a larger number is of course better than a smaller one.

Mort Walker and Greg Walker’s Beetle Bailey for the 26th of July, 2018. Mort Walker’s name is still on the credits, and in the signature. I don’t know whether they’re still working through comics which he had a hand in writing or drawing before his death in January. It would seem amazing to be seven months ahead of deadline — I’ve never got more than two weeks, myself, and even that by cheating — but he did have a pretty good handle on the kinds of jokes he should be telling.

Except when it’s not. A first-rate performance is understood to be better than a third-rate one. A star of the first magnitude is more prominent than one of the fourth. This whether we mean celebrities or heavenly bodies. We have mixed systems. One at least respects the heritage of ancient Greek astronomers, who rated the brightest of stars as first magnitude and the next bunch as second and so on. In this context, if we take brightness to be a good thing, we understand lower numbers to be better. Another system regards the larger numbers as being more of what we’re assumed to want, and therefore be better.

Nasty confusions will happen when the schemes of thought collide. Is a class three hurricane more or less of a threat than a class four? Ought we be more worried if the United States Department of Defense declares it’s moved from Defence Condition four to Defcon 3? In October 1966, the Fermi 1 fission reactor near Detroit suffered a “Class 1 emergency”. Does that mean the city was at the highest or the lowest health risk from the partial meltdown? (In this case, this particular term reflects the lowest actionable level of radiation was detected. I am not competent to speak on how great the risk to the population was.) It would have been nice to have unambiguous language on this point.

On to the joke’s logic, though. Wouldn’t General Halftrack be accustomed to thinking of lower numbers as better? Getting to the green in three strokes is obviously preferable to four, and getting there in five would be a disaster.

Darby Conley’s Get Fuzzy rerun for the 28th of July, 2018. It originally ran the 13th of May, 2006. It may have been repeated since then, also.

Darby Conley’s Get Fuzzy for the 28th is an applied-probability strip. The calculating of odds is rich with mathematical and psychological influences. With some events it’s possible to define quite precisely what the odds should be. If there are a thousand numbers each equally likely to be the daily lottery winner, and only one that will be, we can go from that to saying what the chance of 254 being the winner is. But many events are impossible to forecast that way. We have to use other approaches. If something has happened several times recently, we can say it’s probably rather likely. Fluke events happen, yes. But we can do fairly good work by supposing that stuff is mostly normal, and that the next baseball season will look something like the last one.

As to how to bet wisely — well, many have tried to work that out. One of the big questions in financial mathematics is how to hedge bets. I write financial mathematics, but it applies to sports betting and really anything else with many outcomes. One of the common goals is to simply avoid catastrophe, to make sure that whatever happens you aren’t too badly off. This involves betting various amounts on many outcomes. More on the outcomes you think likely, but also some on the improbable outcomes. Long shots do sometimes happen, and pay out well; it can be worth putting a little money on that just in case. Judging the likelihood of those events, especially in complicated problems that can’t be reduced to logic, is one of the hard parts. If it could be made into a system we wouldn’t need people to do it. But it does seem that knowing what you bet on helps make better bets.

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If you’ve liked this essay you might like other Reading the Comics posts. Many of them are gathered at this link. When I have other essays that discuss The Bent Pinky at this link; it’s a new tag. Essays tagged Daddy’s Home are at this link. Essays that mention the comic strip Non Sequitur should be at this link, when they come up too. (This is another new tag, to my surprise.) Other appearances of Beetle Bailey should be on this page. And other Get Fuzzy-inspired discussions are at this link.

Reading the Comics, July 3, 2014: Wulff and Morgenthaler Edition

Sorry to bring you another page of mathematics comics so soon after the last one, but, I don’t control Comic Strip Master Command. I’m not sure who does, but it’s obviously someone who isn’t paying very close attention to Mary Worth because the current psychic-child/angel-warning-about-pool-safety storyline is really going off the rails. But I can’t think of a way to get that back to mathematical topics, so let me go to safer territories instead.

The Disney Corporation’s _Mickey Mouse_ comic strip rerun on the 28th of June, 2014.

The Disney Corporation’s Mickey Mouse (June 28, rerun) uses the familiar old setup of mathematics stuff — here crossbred with rocket science — as establishment that someone is just way smarter than the rest of the room.

Wulff and Morgenthaler’s Truth Facts — a new strip from the people who do that WuMu which is replacing the strangely endless reruns of Get Fuzzy in your local newspaper (no, I don’t know why Get Fuzzy has been rerunning daily strips since November, and neither do its editors, so far as they’re admitting) — shows a little newspaper sidebar each day. The premise is sure to include a number of mathematics/statistics type jokes and on June 28th they went ahead with the joke that delivers statistics about statistics, so that’s out of the way.

Dave Whamond’s Reality Check (June 29) brings out two of the songs that prominently mention numbers.

Mel Henze’s Gentle Creatures (June 30) drops in a bit of mathematics technobabble for the sake of sounding all serious and science-y and all that. But “apply the standard Lagrangian model” is a better one than average since Joseph-Louis Lagrange was an astoundingly talented and omnipresent mathematician and physicist. Probably his most useful work is a recasting of Newton’s laws of physics in a form in which you don’t have to worry so much about forces at every moment and can instead look at the kinetic and potential energy of a system. This generally reduces the number of equations one has to work with to describe what’s going on, and that usually means it’s easier to understand them. That said I don’t know a specific “Lagrangian model” that would necessarily be relevant. The most popular “Lagrangian model” I can find talks about the flow of particles in a larger fluid and is popular in studying atmospheric pollutants, though the couple of medical citations stuggest it’s also useful for studying how things get transported by the bloodstream. Anyway, it’s nice to hear somebody besides Einstein get used as a science name.

John Rose’s _Barney Google and Snuffy Smith_ for the 1st of July, 2014, featuring neither Barney Google nor Snuffy Smith.

John Rose’s Barney Google and Snuffy Smith (July 1) plays with division word problems and percentages and the way people can subvert the intentions of a problem given any chance.

Bill Watterson’s Calvin and Hobbes (July 1, rerun) lets Calvin’s Dad gently blow Calvin’s mind by pointing out that rotational motion means that different spots on the same object are moving at different speeds yet the object stays in one piece. When you think hard enough about it rotation is a very strange phenomenon (I suppose you could say that about any subject, though), and the difference in speeds within a single object is just part of it. Sometime we must talk about the spinning pail of water.

Wulff and Morgenthaler’s WuMo (July 1) — I named this edition after them for some reason, after all — returns to the potential for mischief in how loosely one uses the word “half”.

Brian Boychuk and Ron Boychuk’s The Chuckle Brothers (July 3) dips into the well of mathematics puns. I admit I had to reread the caption before noticing where the joke was. It’s been a busy week.

Reading the Comics, June 13, 2012

Because there weren’t many math-themed comic strips, that’s why I went so long without an update in my roster of comic strips that mention math subjects. After Mike Peters’s Mother Goose and Grimm put in the start of a binomial expression the comics pages — through King Features Syndicate and gocomics.com — decided to drop the whole subject pretty completely for the rest of May. It picked up a little in June.