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, February 29, 2020: Leap Day Quiet Edition

I can clear out all last week’s mathematically-themed comic strips in one move, it looks like. There were a fair number of strips; it’s just they mostly mention mathematics in passing.

Bill Amend’s FoxTrot for the 23rd — a new strip; it’s still in original production for Sundays — has Jason asking his older sister to double-check a mathematics problem. Double-checking work is reliably useful, as proof against mistakes both stupid and subtle. But that’s true of any field.

Mark Tatulli’s Heart of the City for the 23rd has Heart preparing for an algebra test.

Jim Unger’s Herman for the 23rd has a parent complaining about the weird New Math. The strip is a rerun and I don’t know from when; it hardly matters. The New Math has been a whipping boy for mathematics education since about ten minutes after its creation. And the complaint attaches to every bit of mathematics education reform ever. I am sympathetic to parents, who don’t see why their children should be the test subjects for a new pedagogy. And who don’t want to re-learn mathematics in order to understand what their children are doing. But, still, let someone know you were a mathematics major and they will tell you how much they didn’t understand or like mathematics in school. It’s hard to see why not try teaching it differently.

(If you do go out pretending to be a mathematics major, don’t worry. If someone challenges you on a thing, cite “Euler’s Theorem”, and you’ll have said something on point. And I’ll cover for you.)

Phil Dunlap’s Ink Pen rerun for the 24th has Bixby Rat complain about his mathematics skills.

Brian Gordon’s Fowl Language for the 25th of February, 2020. This strip previously ran the 5th of February, 2016, which happens to be the only other time I have an essay mentioning this comic. That’s from before I tagged comic strips by title, though. So this essay and any future repetitions that happen to mention Fowl Language should be at this link, although the previous one probably won’t be.

Brian Gordon’s Fowl Language for the 25th has a father trying to explain the vastness of Big Numbers to their kid. Past a certain point none of us really know how big a thing is. We can talk about 300 sextillion stars, or anything else, and reason can tell us things about that number. But do we understand it? Like, can we visualize that many stars the way we can imagine twelve stars? This gets us into the philosophy of mathematics pretty soundly. 300 sextillion is no more imaginary than four is, but I know I feel more confident in my understanding of four. How does that make sense? And can you explain that to your kid?

Vic Lee’s Pardon my Planet for the 28th has an appearance by Albert Einstein. And a blackboard full of symbols. The symbols I can make out are more chemistry than mathematics, but they do exist just to serve as decoration.

Bud Blake’s Tiger rerun for the 28th has Hugo mourning his performance on a mathematics test.

Ruben Bolling’s Super-Fun-Pak Comix for the 28th is an installment of The Uncertainty Principal. This is a repeat, even allowing that Super-Fun-Pak Comix are extracted reruns from Tom The Dancing Bug. As I mention in the essay linked there, the uncertainty principle being referred to here is a famous quantum mechanics result. It tells us there are sets of quantities whose values we can’t, even in principle, measure simultaneously to unlimited precision. A precise measurement of, for example, momentum destroys our ability to be precise about position. This is what makes the joke here. The mathematics of this reflects non-commutative sets of operators.

Dave Blazek’s Loose Parts for the 29th is another with a blackboard full of symbols used to express deep thought on a subject.

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And that takes care of last week. I’ll be Reading the Comics for their mathematics content next week, too, although the start of the week has been a slow affair so far. We’ll see if that changes any.

Reading the Comics, June 15, 2019: School Is Out? Edition

This has not been the slowest week for mathematically-themed comic strips. The slowest would be the week nothing on topic came up. But this was close. I admit this is fine as I have things disrupting my normal schedule this week. I don’t need to write too many essays too.

On-topic enough to discuss, though, were:

Lalo Alcaraz’s La Cucaracha for the 9th features a teacher trying to get ahead of student boredom. The idea that mathematics is easier to learn if it’s about problems that seem interesting is a durable one. It agrees with my intuition. I’m less sure that just doing arithmetic while surfing is that helpful. My feeling is that a problem being interesting is separate from a problem naming an intersting thing. But making every problem uniquely interesting is probably too much to expect from a teacher. A good pop-mathematics writer can be interesting about any problem. But the pop-mathematics writer has a lot of choice about what she’ll discuss. And doesn’t need to practice examples of a problem until she can feel confident her readers have learned a skill. I don’t know that there is a good answer to this.

Lalo Alcaraz’s La Cucaracha for the 9th of June, 2019. I had thought I’d mentioned this comic at least a couple times in the past, and seem to be wrong. So this is a new tag and that’s always nice to have. Any future essays which mention something inspired by La Cucaracha should be at this link.

Also part of me feels that “eight sick waves times eight sick waves” has to be “sixty-four sick-waves-squared”. This is me worrying about the dimensional analysis of a joke. All right, but if it were “eight inches times eight inches” and you came back with “sixty-four inches” you’d agree something was off, right? But it’s easy to not notice the units. That we do, mechanically, the same thing in multiplying (oh) three times $1.20 or three times 120 miles or three boxes times 120 items per box as we do multiplying three times 120 encourages this. But if we are using numbers to measure things, and if we are doing calculations about things, then the units matter. They carry information about the kinds of things our calculations represent. It’s a bad idea to misuse or ignore those tools.

Paul Trap’s Thatababy for the 14th is roughly the anthropomorphized geometry cartoon of the week. It does name the three ways to group triangles based on how many sides have the same length. Or if you prefer, how many interior angles have the same measure. So it’s probably a good choice for your geometry tip sheet. “Scalene” as a word seems to have entered English in the 1730s. Its origin traces to Late Latin “scalenus”, from the Greek “skalenos” and meaning “uneven” or “crooked”.

Paul Trap’s Thatababy for the 14th of June, 2019. Now, this strip I thought I featured more around here. It doesn’t seem to have gotten an appearance in over a year, though. Still, other appearances by Thatababy should be in essays at this link.

“Isosceles” also goes to Late Latin and, before that, the Greek “isoskeles”, with “iso” the prefix meaning “equal” and “skeles” meaning “legs”. The curious thing to me is “Isosceles”, besides sounding more pleasant, came to English around 1550. Meanwhile, “equilateral” — a simple Late Latin for “equal sides” — appeared around 1570. I don’t know what was going on that it seemed urgent to have a word for triangles with two equal sides first, and a generation later triangles with three equal sides. And then triangles with no two equal sides went nearly two centuries without getting a custom term.

But, then, I’m aware of my bias. There might have been other words for these concepts, recognized by mathematicians of the year 1600, that haven’t come to us. Or it might be that scalene triangles were thought to be so boring there wasn’t any point giving them a special name. It would take deeper mathematics history knowledge than I have to say.

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Those are all the mathematically-themed comic strips I can find something to discuss from the past week. There were some others with mentions of mathematics, though. These include:

Tony Rubino and Gary Markstein’s Daddy’s Home for the 9th, in which mathematics is the last class of the school year. Francesco Marciuliano and Jim Keefe’s Sally Forth for the 11th has a study session with “math charades” mentioned. Mark Andersons Andertoons for the 11th wants in on some of my sweet Thatababy exposition. Harley Schwadron’s 9 to 5 for the 14th is trying to become the default pie chart joke around here. It won’t beat out Randolph Itch, 2 am without a stronger punch line. And Mark Tatulli’s Heart of the City for the 15th sees Dean mention hiding sleeping in algebra class.

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This closes out a week’s worth of comic strips. My next Reading the Comics post should be at this link next Sunday. And now I need to think of something to post for the Thursday and, if I can, Tuesday publication dates.

Reading the Comics, May 5, 2018: Does Anyone Know Where The Infinite Hotel Comes From Edition

With a light load of mathematically-themed comic strips I’m going to have to think of things to write about twice this coming week. Fortunately, I have plans. We’ll see how that works out for me. So far this year I’m running about one-for-eight on my plans.

Mort Walker and Dik Browne’s Hi and Lois for the 1st of November, 1960 looks pretty familiar somehow. Having noticed what might be the first appearance of “the answer is twelve?” in Peanuts I’m curious why Chip started out by guessing twelve. Probably just coincidence. Possibly that twelve is just big enough to sound mathematical without being conspicuously funny, like 23 or 37 or 42 might be. I’m a bit curious that after the first guess Sally looked for smaller numbers than twelve, while Chip (mostly) looked for larger ones. And I see a logic in going from a first guess of 12 to a second guess of either 4 or 144. The 32 is a weird one.

Mort Walker and Dik Browne’s Hi and Lois for the 1st of November, 1960 and reprinted the 30th of April, 2018. Yeah, sure, eleven years later Charles Schulz would do basically the same joke. But comics snarkers get all smug when they notice that The Argyle Sweater is using the same premise as a Far Side from 1983 or something.

Tom Toles’s Randolph Itch, 2 am for the 30th of April, 2018 is on at least its third appearance around here. I suppose I have to retire the strip from consideration for these comics roundups. It didn’t run that long, sad to say, and I think I’ve featured all its mathematical strips. I’ll go on reading, though, as I like the style and Toles’s sense of humor.

Tom Toles’s Randolph Itch, 2 am for the 30th of April, 2018. I think I’ve mentioned not knowing whether the legendary X on pirate maps is related to the use of X as the thing-to-be-found in algebra. My understanding is the X on a pirate map thing is mostly a matter of storytelling rather than something anyone really did.

Mark Tatulli’s Heart of the City for the 3rd of May is a riff on the motivation problem. For once, not about the motivation of the people in story problems to do what they do. It’s instead about why the student should care what the story people do. And, fair enough, really. It’s easy to calculate something you’d like to know the answer to. But give the teacher or textbook writer a break. There’s nothing that’s interesting to everybody. No, not even what minimum grade they need on this exam to get an A in the course. After a moment of clarity in fifth grade I never cared what my scores were. I just did my work and accepted the assessment. My choice not to worry about my grades had more good than bad results, but I admit, there were bad results too.

Mark Tatulli’s Heart of the City for the 3rd of May, 2018. How does Heart know that Julio is a kid? Adults will go out and buy a dozen apples without that seeming strange, and we’ll eat as many as four of them before forgetting they’re on the counter and letting them rot by accident.

John McNamee’s Pie Comic for the 4th of May riffs on some ancient story-problems built on infinite sets. I don’t know the original source. I assume a Martin Gardiner pop-mathematics essay. I don’t know, though, and I’m curious if anyone does know.

John McNamee’s Pie Comic for the 4th of May, 2018. Also you know how long it’d take to re-code everybody’s door access card? It’d be like forever.

Often I see these kinds of problem as set at the Hilbert Hotel. This references David Hilbert, the late-19th/early-20th century mastermind behind the 20th century’s mathematics field. They try to challenge people’s intuitions about infinitely large sets. Ponder a hotel with one room for each of the counting numbers. Suppose it’s full. How many guests can you add to it? Can you add infinitely many more guests, and still have room for them all? If you do it right, and if “infinitely many more guests” means something particular, yes. If certain practical points don’t get in the way. I mean practical for a hotel with infinitely many rooms.

This is a new-tag comic.

Dave Whamond’s Reality Check for the 4th of May, 2018. Yeah, I heard the sequel to A Canticle for Leibowitz was disappointing.

Dave Whamond’s Reality Check for the 4th is a riff on Albert Einstein’s best-known equation. He had some other work, granted. But who didn’t?

Reading the Comics, April 14, 2018: Friday the 13th Edition?

And now I can close out last week’s mathematically-themed comic strips. There was a bunch toward the end of the week. And I’m surprised that none of the several comics to appear on Friday the 13th had anything to do with the calendar. Or at least not enough for me to talk about them.

Julie Larson’s Dinette Set rerun for the 12th is a joke built on the defining feature of (high school) algebra. The use of a number whose value we hope to figure out isn’t it. Those appear from the start of arithmetic, often as an empty square or circle or a spot of ____ that’s to be filled out. We used to give these numbers names like “thing” or “heap” or “it” or the like. Something pronoun-like. The shift to using ‘x’ as the shorthand is a legacy of the 16th century, the time when what we see as modern algebra took shape. People are frightened by it, to suddenly see letters in the midst of a bunch of numbers. But it’s no more than another number. And it communicates “algebra” in a way maybe nothing else does.

Julie Larson’s Dinette Set rerun for the 12th of April, 2018. Don’t be thrown by the side bits like the show on the TV or the rather oversized Nutty Professor DVD box. They’re just side jokes, not part of the main gag.

Ruben Bolling’s Tom the Dancing Bug rerun for the 12th is one of the God-Man stories. I’m delighted by the Freshman Philosophy-Major Man villain. The strip builds on questions of logic, and about what people mean by “omnipotence”. I don’t know how much philosophy of mathematics the average major takes. I suspect it’s about as much philosophy of mathematics as the average mathematics major is expected to take. (It’s an option, but I don’t remember anyone suggesting I do it, and I do feel the lost opportunity.) But perhaps later on Freshman Philosophy-Major Man would ask questions like what do we mean by “one” and “plus” and “equals” and “three”. And whether anything could, by a potent enough entity, be done about them. For the easiest way to let an omnipotent creature change something like that. WordPress is telling me this is a new tag for me. That can’t be right.

Ruben Bolling’s Tom the Dancing Bug rerun for the 12th of April, 2018. Yes, basically every God-Man installment is the same strip, but it works for me every time. (It helps that there’s only a couple each year.)

Mike Thompson’s Grand Avenue for the 13th is another resisting-the-story-problem joke, attacking the idea that a person would have ten apples. People like to joke about story problems hypothesizing people with ridiculous numbers of pieces of fruit. But ten doesn’t seem like an excessive number of apples to me; my love and I could eat that many in two weeks without trying hard. The attempted diversion would work better if it were something like forty watermelons or the like.

Mike Thompson’s Grand Avenue for the 13th of April, 2018. And I realize this is like the complaint I raised about the Grand Avenue earlier this week. But Gabby is assuming that Sally is carrying around ten apples, when the problem hasn’t said anything of the sort. Ten isn’t a ridiculous number of apples to carry to start with, but to simply have them in one’s possession? That’s just not peculiar.

Mark Tatulli’s Heart of the City for the 13th has Heart and Dean complaining about their arithmetic class. I rate it as enough to include here because they go into some detail about things. I find it interesting they’re doing story problems with decimal points; that seems advanced for what I’d always taken their age to be. But I don’t know. I have dim memories of what elementary school was like, and that was in a late New Math-based curriculum.

Mark Tatulli’s Heart of the City for the 13th of April, 2018. One of the things I do appreciate about Heart of the City is that while Dean is a nerd and mostly likes school, he’s not one-note about it and gets as tired of it as anyone else does. Nerd kids in comic strips have a tendency to take their pro-school agenda a bit far.

Nick Galifianakis’s Nick and Zuzu for the 13th is a Venn diagram joke, the clearest example of one we’ve gotten in a while. I believe WordPress when it tells me this is a new tag for the comic strip.

Nick Galifianakis’s Nick and Zuzu for the 13th of April, 2018. First, this is some of the nicest grey-washing I’ve seen in these Reading the Comics posts in a while. Second, my experience is that spite with integrity is some of the most fun and delightful that spite ever gets to be. The integrity lets you add a layer of smugness to the spite. And if anyone protests, you get to feel smugly superior to them, too.

Mark Anderson’s Andertoons for the 14th is the Mark Anderson’s Andertoons for the week. It starts at least with teaching ordinal numbers. In normal English that’s the adjective form of a number. Ordinal numbers reappear in the junior or senior year of a mathematics major’s work, as they learn enough set theory to be confused by infinities. In this guise they describe the sizes of sets of things. And they’re introduced as companions to cardinal numbers, which also describe the sizes of sets of things. They’re different, in ways that I feel like I always forget in-between reading books about infinitely large sets. The kids don’t need to worry about this yet.

Mark Anderson’s Andertoons for the 14th of April, 2018. The kid appears often enough I feel like I should know his name. Or assign one in case the strip doesn’t have a canonical name for him. I’ll take nominations if anyone wants to offer them.

Reading the Comics, February 3, 2018: Overworked Edition

And this should clear out last week’s mathematically-themed comic strips. I didn’t realize just how busy last week had been until I looked at what I thought was a backlog of just two days’ worth of strips and it turned out to be about two thousand comics. I exaggerate, but as ever, not by much. This current week seems to be a more relaxed pace. So I’ll have to think of something to write for the Tuesday and Thursday slots. Hm. (I’ll be all right. I’ve got one thing I need to stop bluffing about and write, and there’s usually a fair roundup of interesting tweets or articles I’ve seen that I can write. Those are often the most popular articles around here.)

Hilary Price and Rina Piccolo’s Rhymes with Orange for the 1st of February, 2018 gives us an anthropomorphic geometric figures joke for the week. Also a side of these figures that I don’t think I’ve seen in the newspaper comics before. It kind of raises further questions.

Hilary Price and Rina Piccolo’s Rhymes with Orange for the 1st of February, 2018. All right, but they’re line segments, but I suppose you can’t reasonably draw infinitely vast things in a daily newspaper strip’s space. The lean of that triangle makes it look way more skeptical, even afraid, than I think Price and Piccolo intended, but I’m not sure there’s a better way to get these two in frame without making the composition weird.

Jason Chatfield’s Ginger Meggs for the 1st just mentions that it’s a mathematics test. Ginger isn’t ready for it.

Mark Tatulli’s Heart of the City rerun for the 1st finally has some specific mathematics mentioned in Heart’s efforts to avoid a mathematics tutor. The bit about the sum of adjacent angles forming a right line being 180 degrees is an important one. A great number of proofs rely on it. I can’t deny the bare fact seems dull, though. I know offhand, for example, that this bit about adjacent angles comes in handy in proving that the interior angles of a triangle add up to 180 degrees. At least for Euclidean geometry. And there are non-Euclidean geometries that are interesting and important and for which that’s not true. Which inspires the question: on a non-Euclidean surface, like say the surface of the Earth, is it that adjacent angles don’t add up to 180 degrees? Or does something else in the proof of a triangle’s interior angles adding up to 180 degrees go wrong?

The Eric the Circle rerun for the 2nd, by JohnG, is one of the occasional Erics that talk about π and so get to be considered on-topic here.

Bill Whitehead’s Free Range for the 2nd features the classic page full of equations to demonstrate some hard mathematical work. And it is the sort of subject that is done mathematically. The equations don’t look to me anything like what you’d use for asteroid orbit projections. I’d expect forecasting just where an asteroid might hit the Earth to be done partly by analytic formulas that could be done on a blackboard. And then made precise by a numerical estimate. The advantage of the numerical estimate is that stuff like how air resistance affects the path of something in flight is hard to deal with analytically. Numerically, it’s tedious, but we can let the computer deal with the tedium. So there’d be just a boring old computer screen to show on-panel.

Bud Fisher’s Mutt and Jeff reprint for the 2nd is a little baffling. And not really mathematical. It’s just got a bizarre arithmetic error in it. Mutt’s fiancee Encee wants earrings that cost ten dollars (each?) and Mutt takes this to be fifty dollars in earring costs and I have no idea what happened there. Thomas K Dye, the web cartoonist who’s done artwork for various article series, has pointed out that the lettering on these strips have been redone with a computer font. (Look at the letters ‘S’; once you see it, you’ll also notice it in the slightly lumpy ‘O’ and the curly-arrow ‘G’ shapes.) So maybe in the transcription the earring cost got garbled? And then not a single person reading the finished product read it over and thought about what they were doing? I don’t know.

Zach Weinersmith’s Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal reprint for the 2nd is based, as his efforts to get my attention often are, on a real mathematical physics postulate. As the woman postulates: given a deterministic universe, with known positions and momentums of every particle, and known forces for how all these interact, it seems like it should be possible to predict the future perfectly. It would also be possible to “retrodict” the past. All the laws of physics that we know are symmetric in time; there’s no reason you can’t predict the motion of something one second into the past just as well as you an one second into the future. This fascinating observation took a lot of battery in the 19th century. Many physical phenomena are better described by statistical laws, particularly in thermodynamics, the flow of heat. In these it’s often possible to predict the future well but retrodict the past not at all.

But that looks as though it’s a matter of computing power. We resort to a statistical understanding of, say, the rings of Saturn because it’s too hard to track the billions of positions and momentums we’d need to otherwise. A sufficiently powerful mathematician, for example God, would be able to do that. Fair enough. Then came the 1890s. Henri Poincaré discovered something terrifying about deterministic systems. It’s possible to have chaos. A mathematical representation of a system is a bit different from the original system. There’s some unavoidable error. That’s bound to make some, larger, error in any prediction of its future. For simple enough systems, this is okay. We can make a projection with an error as small as we need, at the cost of knowing the current state of affairs with enough detail. Poincaré found that some systems can be chaotic, though, ones in which any error between the current system and its representation will grow to make the projection useless. (At least for some starting conditions.) And so many interesting systems are chaotic. Incredibly simplified models of the weather are chaotic; surely the actual thing is. This implies that God’s projection of the universe would be an amusing but almost instantly meaningless toy. At least unless it were a duplicate of the universe. In which case we have to start asking our philosopher friends about the nature of identity and what a universe is, exactly.

Ruben Bolling’s Super-Fun-Pak Comix for the 2nd is an installment of Guy Walks Into A Bar featuring what looks like an arithmetic problem to start. It takes a turn into base-ten jokes. There are times I suspect Ruben Bolling to be a bit of a nerd.

Nate Fakes’s Break of Day for the 3rd looks like it’s trying to be an anthropomorphic-numerals joke. At least it’s an anthropomorphic something joke.

Percy Crosby’s Skippy for the 3rd originally ran the 8th of December, 1930. It alludes to one of those classic probability questions: what’s the chance that in your lungs is one of the molecules exhaled by Julius Caesar in his dying gasp? Or whatever other event you want: the first breath you ever took, or something exhaled by Jesus during the Sermon on the Mount, or exhaled by Sue the T-Rex as she died. Whatever. The chance is always surprisingly high, which reflects the fact there’s a lot of molecules out there. This also reflects a confidence that we can say one molecule of air is “the same” as some molecule if air in a much earlier time. We have to make that supposition to have a problem we can treat mathematically. My understanding is chemists laugh at us if we try to suggest this seriously. Fair enough. But whether the air pumped out of a bicycle tire is ever the same as what’s pumped back in? That’s the same kind of problem. At least some of the molecules of air will be the same ones. Pretend “the same ones” makes sense. Please.

Reading the Comics, January 27, 2018: Working Through The Week Edition

And today I bring the last couple mathematically-themed comic strips sent my way last week. GoComics has had my comics page working intermittently this week. And I was able to get a response from them, by e-mailing their international sales office, the only non-form contact I could find. Anyway, this flood of comics does take up the publishing spot I’d figured for figuring how I messed up Wronski’s formula. But that’s all right, as I wanted to spend more time thinking about that. Here’s hoping spending more time thinking works out for me.

Nate Fakes’s Break of Day for the 24th was the big anthropomorphic numerals joke for the week. And it’s even dubbed the numbers game.

Mark Tatulli’s Heart of the City from the 24th got into a storyline about Heart needing a mathematics tutor. It’s a rerun sequence, although if you remember a particular comic storyline from 2009 you’re doing pretty well. Nothing significantly mathematical has turned up in the story so far, past the mention of fractions as things that exist and torment students. But the stories are usually pretty good for this sort of strip.

Mikael Wulff and Anders Morganthaler’s WuMo for the 24th includes a story problems freak out. I’m not sure what’s particularly implausible about buying nine apples. I’d agree a person is probably more likely to buy an even number of things, since we seem to like numbers like “ten” and “eight” so well, but it’s hardly ridiculous.

Tim Rickard’s Brewster Rockit for the 25th is an arithmetic class on the Snowman Planet. So there’s some finger-counting involved.

Zach Weinersmith’s Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal for the 28th is a reminder that most of my days are spent seeing how Zach Weinersmith wants my attention. It also includes what I suppose is a legitimate attempt to offer a definition for what all mathematics is. It’s hard to come up with something that does cover all the stuff mathematicians do. Bear in mind, this includes counting, calculating how far the Sun is based on the appearance of a lunar eclipse, removing static from a recording, and telling how many queens it’s possible to place eight queens on a chess board that’s wrapped around a torus without any being able to capture another, among other problems. My instinct is to dismiss the proposed “anything you can think deeply about that has no reference to the real world”. That seems over-broad, and to cover a lot of areas that are really philosophy’s beat. And I think there’s something unseemly in mathematicians gloating about their work having no “practical” use. I grant I come from an applied school, and I came to there through an interest in physics. But to build up “inapplicability to the real word” as if it were some ideal, as opposed to just how something has turned out to be right now, strikes me as silly. Applicability is so dependent on context, on culture, and accidents of fate that there’s no way it can be important to characterizing mathematics. And it would imply that once we found a use for something it would stop being mathematically interesting. I don’t see evidence of that in mathematical history.

Mikael Wulff and Anders Morganthaler’s WuMo pops back in on the 27th with an appearance of sudoku, presenting the logic puzzle as one of the many things beyond the future Disgraced Former President’s abilities.

Reading the Comics, January 13, 2018: Barney Google Is Messing With My Head For Some Reason Edition

I do not know what’s possessed John Rose, cartoonist for Barney Google and Snuffy Smith — possibly the oldest syndicated comic strip not in perpetual reruns — to decide he needs to mess with my head. So far as I’m aware we haven’t ever even had any interactions. While I’ll own up to snarking about the comic strip here and there, I mean, the guy draws Barney Google and Snuffy Smith. He won’t attract the snark community of, say, Marmaduke, but he knew the job was dangerous when he took it. There’s lots of people who’ve said worse things about the comic than I ever have. He can’t be messing with them all.

There’s no mathematical content to it, but here, continuing the curious thread of Elviney and Miss Prunelly looking the same, and Elviney turning out to have a twin sister, is the revelation that Elviney’s husband also has a twin.

John Rose’s Barney Google and Snuffy Smith for the 14th of January, 2018. The commenters at Comics Kingdom don’t know where this Lucius character came from so I guess now suddenly everybody in Hootin Holler is a twin and we never knew it before I started asking questions?

This means something and I don’t know what.

To mathematics:

Zach Weinersmith’s Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal gets my attention again for the 10th. There is this famous quotation from Leopold Kronecker, one of the many 19th century German mathematicians who challenged, and set, our ideas of what mathematics is. In debates about what should count as a proof Kronecker said something translated in English to, “God created the integers, all else is the work of man”. He favored proofs that only used finite numbers, and only finitely many operations, and was skeptical of existence proofs. Those are ones that show something with desired properties must exist, without necessarily showing how to find it. Most mathematicians accept existence proofs. If you can show how to find that thing, that’s a constructive proof. Usually mathematicians like those better.

Mark Tatulli’s Heart of the City for the 11th uses a bunch of arithmetic and word problems to represent all of Dean’s homework. All looks like reasonable homework for my best guess about his age.

Jon Rosenberg’s Scenes From A Multiverse for the 11th is a fun, simple joke with some complex stuff behind it. It’s riffing on the kind of atheist who wants moral values to come from something in the STEM fields. So here’s a mathematical basis for some moral principles. There are, yes, ethical theories that have, or at least imply having, mathematics behind them. Utilitarianism at least supposes that ethical behavior can be described as measurable and computable quantities. Nobody actually does that except maybe to make video games more exciting. But it’s left with the idea that one could, and hope that this would lead to guidance that doesn’t go horribly wrong.

Don Asmussen’s Bad Reporter for the 12th uses knowledge of arithmetic as a signifier of intelligence. Common enough joke style.

Thom Bluemel’s Birdbrains for the 13th starts Pi Day observances early, or maybe supposed the joke would be too out of season were it to come in March.

Greg Evans and Karen Evans’s Luann for the 13th uses mathematics to try building up the villainy of one of the strip’s designated villains. Ann Eiffel, there, uses a heap of arithmetic to make her lingerie sale sound better. This isn’t simply a riff on people not wanting to do arithmetic, although I understand people not wanding to work out what five percent of a purchase of over $200 is. There’s a good deal of weird psychology in getting people to buy things. Merely naming a number, for example, gets people to “anchor” their expectations to it. To speak of a free gift worth $75 makes any purchase below $75 seem more economical. To speak of a chance to win $1,000 prepares people to think they’ve got a thousand dollars coming in, and that they can safely spend under that. It’s amazing stuff to learn about, and it isn’t all built on people being too lazy to figure out what five percent off of $220 would be.

T Lewis and Michael Fry’s Over the Hedge for the 13th uses &infty; along the way to making nonsense out of ice-skating judging. It’s a good way to make a hash of a rating system. Most anything done with infinitely large numbers or infinitely large sets challenges one’s intuition at least. This is part of what Leopold Kronecker was talking about.

Reading the Comics, July 30, 2017: Not Really Mathematics edition

It’s been a busy enough week at Comic Strip Master Command that I’ll need to split the results across two essays. Any other week I’d be glad for this, since, hey, free content. But this week it hits a busy time and shouldn’t I have expected that? The odd thing is that the mathematics mentions have been numerous but not exactly deep. So let’s watch as I make something big out of that.

Mark Tatulli’s Heart of the City closed out its “Math Camp” storyline this week. It didn’t end up having much to do with mathematics and was instead about trust and personal responsibility issues. You know, like stories about kids who aren’t learning to believe in themselves and follow their dreams usually are. Since we never saw any real Math Camp activities we don’t get any idea what they were trying to do to interest kids in mathematics, which is a bit of a shame. My guess would be they’d play a lot of the logic-driven puzzles that are fun but that they never get to do in class. The story established that what I thought was an amusement park was instead a fair, so, that might be anywhere Pennsylvania or a couple of other nearby states.

Rick Kirkman and Jerry Scott’s Baby Blues for the 25th sees Hammie have “another” mathematics worksheet accident. Could be any subject, really, but I suppose it would naturally be the one that hey wait a minute, why is he doing mathematics worksheets in late July? How early does their school district come back from summer vacation, anyway?

Rick Kirkman and Jerry Scott’s Baby Blues for the 25th of July, 2017 Almost as alarming: Hammie is clearly way behind on his “faking plausible excuses” homework. If he doesn’t develop the skills to make a credible reason why he didn’t do something how is he ever going to dodge texts from people too important not to reply to?

Olivia Walch’s Imogen Quest for the 26th uses a spot of mathematics as the emblem for teaching. In this case it’s a bit of physics. And an important bit of physics, too: it’s the time-dependent Schrödinger Equation. This is the one that describes how, if you know the total energy of the system, and the rules that set its potential and kinetic energies, you can work out the function Ψ that describes it. Ψ is a function, and it’s a powerful one. It contains probability distributions: how likely whatever it is you’re modeling is to have a particle in this region, or in that region. How likely it is to have a particle with this much momentum, versus that much momentum. And so on. Each of these we find by applying a function to the function Ψ. It’s heady stuff, and amazing stuff to me. Ψ somehow contains everything we’d like to know. And different functions work like filters that make clear one aspect of that.

Dan Thompson’s Brevity for the 26th is a joke about Sesame Street‘s Count von Count. Also about how we can take people’s natural aptitudes and delights and turn them into sad, droning unpleasantness in the service of corporate overlords. It’s fun.

Steve Sicula’s Home and Away rerun for the 26th is a misplaced Pi Day joke. It originally ran the 22nd of April, but in 2010, before Pi Day was nearly so much a thing.

Doug Savage’s Savage Chickens for the 26th proves something “scientific” by putting numbers into it. Particularly, by putting statistics into it. Understandable impulse. One of the great trends of the past century has been taking the idea that we only understand things when they are measured. And this implies statistics. Everything is unique. Only statistical measurement lets us understand what groups of similar things are like. Does something work better than the alternative? We have to run tests, and see how the something and the alternative work. Are they so similar that the differences between them could plausibly be chance alone? Are they so different that it strains belief that they’re equally effective? It’s one of science’s tools. It’s not everything which makes for science. But it is stuff easy to communicate in one panel.

Neil Kohney’s The Other End for the 26th is really a finance joke. It’s about the ways the finance industry can turn one thing into a dazzling series of trades and derivative trades. But this is a field that mathematics colonized, or that colonized mathematics, over the past generation. Mathematical finance has done a lot to shape ideas of how we might study risk, and probability, and how we might form strategies to use that risk. It’s also done a lot to shape finance. Pretty much any major financial crisis you’ve encountered since about 1990 has been driven by a brilliant new mathematical concept meant to govern risk crashing up against the fact that humans don’t behave the way some model said they should. Nor could they; models are simplified, abstracted concepts that let hard problems be approximated. Every model has its points of failure. Hopefully we’ll learn enough about them that major financial crises can become as rare as, for example, major bridge collapses or major airplane disasters.

Reading the Comics, July 15, 2017: Dawn Of Mathematics Jokes

So I try to keep up with nearly all the comic strips run on Comics Kingdom and on GoComics. This includes some vintage strips: take some ancient comic like Peanuts or Luann and rerun it, day at a time, from the beginning. This is always enlightening. It’s always interesting to see a comic in that first flush of creative energy, before the characters have quite settled in and before the cartoonist has found stock jokes that work so well they don’t even have to be jokes anymore. One of the most startling cases for me has been Johnny Hart’s B.C. which, in its Back To B.C. incarnation, has been pretty well knocking it out of the park.

Not this week, I’m sad to admit. This week it’s been doing a bunch of mathematics jokes, which is what gives me my permission to talk about it here. The jokes have been, eh, the usual, given the setup. A bit fresher, I suppose, for the characters in the strip having had fewer of their edges worn down by time. Probably there’ll be at least one that gets a bit of a grin.

Back To B.C. for the 11th sets the theme going. On the 12th it gets into word problems. And then for the 13th of July it turns violent and for my money funny.

Mark Tatulli’s Heart of the City has a number appear on the 12th. That’s been about as much mathematical content as Heart’s experience at Math Camp has taken. The story’s been more about Dana, her camp friend, who’s presented as good enough at mathematics to be bored with it, and the attempt to sneak out to the nearby amusement park. What has me distracted is wondering what amusement park this could be, given that Heart’s from Philadelphia and the camp’s within bus-trip range and in the forest. I can’t rule out that it might be Knoebels Amusement Park, in Elysburg, Pennsylvania, in which case Heart and Dana are absolutely right to sneak out of camp because it is this amazing place.

Mort Walker’s Beetle Bailey Vintage for the 21st of December, 1960 and rerun the 14th of July, 2017. Wow, I remember when they’d put recipes like this on the not-actual-news segment of the 5:00 news or so, and how much it irritated me that there wasn’t any practical way to write down the whole thing and even writing down the address to mail in for the recipe seemed like too much, what with how long it took on average to find a sheet of paper and a writing tool. In hindsight, I don’t know why this was so hard for me.

Mort Walker’s Beetle Bailey Vintage for the 21st of December, 1960 was rerun the 14th. I can rope this into mathematics. It’s about Cookie trying to scale up a recipe to fit Camp Swampy’s needs. Increasing the ingredient count is easy, or at least it is if your units scale nicely. I wouldn’t want to multiple a third of a teaspoon by 200 without a good stretching beforehand and maybe a rubdown afterwards. But the time needed to cook a multiplied recipe, that gets mysterious. As I understand it — the chemistry of cooking is largely a mystery to me — the center of the trouble is that to cook a thing, heat has to reach throughout the interior. But heat can only really be applied from the surfaces of the cooked thing. (Yes, theoretically, a microwave oven could bake through the entire volume of something. But this would require someone inventing a way to bake using a microwave.) So we must balance the heat that can be applied over what surface to the interior volume and any reasonable time to cook the thing. Won’t deny that at some point it seems easier to just make a smaller meal.

Zach Weinersmith’s Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal for the 14th goes to the old “inference testing” well again. This comes up from testing whether something strange is going on. Measure something in a sample. Is the result appreciably different from what would be a plausible result if nothing interesting is going on? The null hypothesis is the supposition that there isn’t anything interesting going on: the measurement’s in the range of what you’d expect given that the world is big and complicated. I’m not sure what the physicist’s exact experiment would have been. I suppose it would be something like “you lose about as much heat through your head as you do any region of skin of about the same surface area”. So, yeah, freezing would be expected, considering.

Percy Crosby’s Skippy for the 17th of May, 1930, and rerun the 15th, maybe doesn’t belong here. It’s just about counting. Never mind. I smiled at it, and I’m a fan of the strip. Give it a try; it’s that rare pre-Peanuts comic that still feels modern.

And, before I forget: Have any mathematics words or terms you’d like to have explained? I’m doing a Summer 2017 A To Z and taking requests! Please offer them over there, for convenience. I mean mine.

Reading the Comics, July 8, 2017: Mostly Just Pointing Edition

Won’t lie: I was hoping for a busy week. While Comic Strip Master Command did send a healthy number of mathematically-themed comic strips, I can’t say they were a particularly deep set. Most of what I have to say is that here’s a comic strip that mentions mathematics. Well, you’re reading me for that, aren’t you? Maybe. Tell me if you’re not. I’m curious.

Richard Thompson’s Cul de Sac rerun for the 2nd of July is the anthropomorphic numerals joke for the week. And a great one, as I’d expect of Thompson, since it also turns into a little bit about how to create characters.

Ralph Dunagin and Dana Summers’s Middletons for the 2nd uses mathematics as the example of the course a kid might do lousy in. You never see this for Social Studies classes, do you?

Mark Tatulli’s Heart of the City for the 3rd made the most overtly mathematical joke for most of the week at Math Camp. The strip hasn’t got to anything really annoying yet; it’s mostly been average summer-camp jokes. I admit I’ve been distracted trying to figure out if the minor characters are Tatulli redrawing Peanuts characters in his style. I mean, doesn’t Dana (the freckled girl in the third panel, here) look at least a bit like Peppermint Patty? I’ve also seen a Possible Marcie and a Possible Shermy, who’s the Peanuts character people draw when they want an obscure Peanuts character who isn’t 5. (5 is the Boba Fett of the Peanuts character set: an extremely minor one-joke character used for a week in 1963 but who appeared very occasionally in the background until 1983. You can identify him by the ‘5’ on his shirt. He and his sisters 3 and 4 are the ones doing the weird head-sideways dance in A Charlie Brown Christmas.)

Mark Pett’s Lucky Cow rerun for the 4th is another use of mathematics, here algebra, as a default sort of homework assignment.

Brant Parker and Johnny Hart’s Wizard of Id Classics for the 4th reruns the Wizard of Id for the 7th of July, 1967. It’s your typical calculation-error problem, this about the forecasting of eclipses. I admit the forecasting of eclipses is one of those bits of mathematics I’ve never understood, but I’ve never tried to understand either. I’ve just taken for granted that the Moon’s movements are too much tedious work to really enlighten me and maybe I should reevaluate that. Understanding when the Moon or the Sun could be expected to disappear was a major concern for people doing mathematics for centuries.

Keith Tutt and Daniel Saunders’s Lard’s World Peace Tips for the 5th is a Special Relativity joke, which is plenty of mathematical content for me. I warned you it was a week of not particularly deep discussions.

Ashleigh Brilliant’s Pot-Shots rerun for the 5th is a cute little metric system joke. And I’m going to go ahead and pretend that’s enough mathematical content. I’ve come to quite like Brilliant’s cheerfully despairing tone.

Jason Chatfield’s Ginger Meggs for the 7th mentions fractions, so you can see how loose the standards get around here when the week is slow enough.

John Rose’s Barney Google and Snuffy Smith for the 8th of July, 2017. So I know it’s a traditional bit of comic strip graphic design to avoid using a . at the end of sentences, as it could be too easily lost — or duplicated — in a printing error. Thus the long history of comic strip sentences that end with a ! mark, unambiguous even if the dot goes missing or gets misaligned. But double exclamation points for everything? What goes on here?

John Rose’s Barney Google and Snuffy Smith for the 8th finally gives me a graphic to include this week. It’s about the joke you would expect from the topic of probability being mentioned. And, as might be expected, the comic strip doesn’t precisely accurately describe the state of the law. Any human endeavour has to deal with probabilities. They give us the ability to have reasonable certainty about the confusing and ambiguous information the world presents.

Vic Lee’s Pardon My Planet for the 8th of July, 2017. I gotta say, I look at that equation in the middle with m raised to the 7th power and feel a visceral horror. And yet I dealt with exactly this horrible thing once and it came out all right.

Vic Lee’s Pardon My Planet for the 8th is another Albert Einstein mention. The bundle of symbols don’t mean much of anything, at least not as they’re presented, but of course superstar equation E = mc² turns up. It could hardly not.

Reading the Comics, July 1, 2017: Deluge Edition, Part 2

Last week started off going like Gangbusters, a phrase I think that’s too old-fashioned for my father to say but that I’ve picked up because I like listening to old-time radio and, you know, Gangbusters really does get going like that. Give it a try sometime, if you’re open to that old-fashioned sort of narrative style and blatant FBI agitprop. You might want to turn the volume down a little before you do. It slowed down the second half of the week, which is mostly fine as I’d had other things taking up my time. Let me finish off last week and hope there’s a good set of comics to review for next Sunday and maybe Tuesday.

Ted Shearer’s Quincy for the 4th of May, 1978 was rerun the 28th of June. It’s got the form of your student-resisting-the-word-problem joke. And mixes in a bit of percentages which is all the excuse I need to include it here. That and how Shearer uses halftone screening. It’s also a useful reminder of how many of our economic problems could be solved quickly if poor people got more money.

Ted Shearer’s Quincy for the 4th of May, 1978 Not answered: wait, Quincy’s Granny has to make regular payments to the undertaker? Is ‘the preacher, the doctor, lawyer and undertaker’ some traditional phrasing that I’m too young and white and suburban to recognize or should I infer that Granny has a shocking and possibly illicit hobby?

Olivia Walch’s Imogen Quest for the 28th features Gottfried Leibniz — missing his birthday by three days, incidentally — and speaks of the priority dispute about the invention of calculus. I’m not sure there is much serious questioning anymore about Leibniz’s contributions to mathematics. I think they might be even more strongly appreciated these days than they ever used to be, as people learn more about his work in computing machines and the attempt to automate calculation.

Mark Anderson’s Andertoons for the 28th is our soothing, familiar Andertoons for this essay. I remember in learning about equivalent forms of fractions wondering why anyone cared about reducing them. If two things have the same meaning, why do we need to go further? There are a couple answers. One is that it’s easier on us to understand a quantity if it’s a shorter, more familiar form. has a meaning that just does not. And another is that we often want to know whether two things are equivalent, or close. Is \frac{1147}{1517} more or less than ? Good luck eyeballing that.

And we learn, later on, that a lot of mathematics is about finding different ways to write the same thing. Each way has its uses. Sometimes a slightly more complicated way to write a thing makes proving something easier. There’s about two solids months of Real Analysis, for example, where you keep on writing that and this “adding zero” turns out to make proofs possible. Even easy.

Mark Tatulli’s Heart of the City remains on my watch-with-caution list as the Math Camp story continues. But the strip from the 28th tickles me with the idea of crossing mathematics camp with Pinocchio‘s Pleasure Island. I’m imagining something where Heart starts laughing at something and ends up turning into something from Donald Duck’s Mathmagic land.

Dave Blazek’s Loose Parts for the 28th is your traditional blackboard-full-of-symbols joke. I’m amused.

Tony Rubino and Gary Markstein’s Daddy’s Home for the 1st of July is your traditional “mathematics is something hard” joke. I have the feeling it’s a rerun, but I lack the emotional investment in whether it is a rerun to check. The joke’s comfortable and familiar as it is, anyway.

Reading the Comics, June 26, 2017: Deluge Edition, Part 1

So this past week saw a lot of comic strips with some mathematical connection put forth. There were enough just for the 26th that I probably could have done an essay with exclusively those comics. So it’s another split-week edition, which suits me fine as I need to balance some of my writing loads the next couple weeks for convenience (mine).

Tony Cochrane’s Agnes for the 25th of June is fun as the comic strip almost always is. And it’s even about estimation, one of the things mathematicians do way more than non-mathematicians expect. Mathematics has a reputation for precision, when in my experience it’s much more about understanding and controlling error methods. Even in analysis, the study of why calculus works, the typical proof amounts to showing that the difference between what you want to prove and what you can prove is smaller than your tolerance for an error. So: how do we go about estimating something difficult, like, the number of stars? If it’s true that nobody really knows, how do we know there are some wrong answers? And the underlying answer is that we always know some things, and those let us rule out answers that are obviously low or obviously high. We can make progress.

Russell Myers’s Broom Hilda for the 25th is about one explanation given for why time keeps seeming to pass faster as one age. This is a mathematical explanation, built on the idea that the same linear unit of time is a greater proportion of a young person’s lifestyle so of course it seems to take longer. This is probably partly true. Most of our senses work by a sense of proportion: it’s easy to tell a one-kilogram from a two-kilogram weight by holding them, and easy to tell a five-kilogram from a ten-kilogram weight, but harder to tell a five from a six-kilogram weight.

As ever, though, I’m skeptical that anything really is that simple. My biggest doubt is that it seems to me time flies when we haven’t got stories to tell about our days, when they’re all more or less the same. When we’re doing new or exciting or unusual things we remember more of the days and more about the days. A kid has an easy time finding new things, and exciting or unusual things. Broom Hilda, at something like 1500-plus years old and really a dour, unsociable person, doesn’t do so much that isn’t just like she’s done before. Wouldn’t that be an influence? And I doubt that’s a complete explanation either. Real things are more complicated than that yet.

Mac and Bill King’s Magic In A Minute for the 25th features a form-a-square puzzle using some triangles. Mathematics? Well, logic anyway. Also a good reminder about open-mindedness when you’re attempting to construct something.

Norm Feuti’s Retail for the 26th of June, 2017. So, one of my retail stories that I might well have already told because I only ever really had one retail job and there’s only so many stories you get working a year and a half in a dying mall’s book store. I was a clerk at Walden Books. The customer wanted to know for this book whether the sticker’s 10 percent discount was taken before or after the state’s 6 percent sales tax was applied. I said I thought the discount taken first and then tax applied, but it didn’t matter if I were wrong as the total would be the same amount. I calculated what it would be. The customer was none too sure about this, but allowed me to ring it up. The price encoded in the UPC was wrong, something like a dollar more than the cover price, and the subtotal came out way higher. The customer declared, “See?” And wouldn’t have any of my explaining that he was hit by a freak event. I don’t remember other disagreements between the UPC price and the cover price, but that might be because we just corrected the price and didn’t get a story out of it.

Norm Feuti’s Retail for the 26th is about how you get good at arithmetic. I suspect there’s two natural paths; you either find it really interesting in your own right, or you do it often enough you want to find ways to do it quicker. Marla shows the signs of learning to do arithmetic quickly because she does it a lot: turning “30 percent off” into “subtract ten percent three times over” is definitely the easy way to go. The alternative is multiplying by seven and dividing by ten and you don’t want to multiply by seven unless the problem gives a good reason why you should. And I certainly don’t fault the customer not knowing offhand what 30 percent off $25 would be. Why would she be in practice doing this sort of problem?

Johnny Hart’s Back To B.C. for the 26th reruns the comic from the 30th of December, 1959. In it … uh … one of the cavemen guys has found his calendar for the next year has too many days. (Think about what 1960 was.) It’s a common problem. Every calendar people have developed has too few or too many days, as the Earth’s daily rotations on its axis and annual revolution around the sun aren’t perfectly synchronized. We handle this in many different ways. Some calendars worry little about tracking solar time and just follow the moon. Some calendars would run deliberately short and leave a little stretch of un-named time before the new year started; the ancient Roman calendar, before the addition of February and January, is famous in calendar-enthusiast circles for this. We’ve now settled on a calendar which will let the nominal seasons and the actual seasons drift out of synch slowly enough that periodic changes in the Earth’s orbit will dominate the problem before the error between actual-year and calendar-year length will matter. That’s a pretty good sort of error control.

8,978,432 is not anywhere near the number of days that would be taken between 4,000 BC and the present day. It’s not a joke about Bishop Ussher’s famous research into the time it would take to fit all the Biblically recorded events into history. The time is something like 24,600 years ago, a choice which intrigues me. It would make fair sense to declare, what the heck, they lived 25,000 years ago and use that as the nominal date for the comic strip. 24,600 is a weird number of years. Since it doesn’t seem to be meaningful I suppose Hart went, simply enough, with a number that was funny just for being riotously large.

Mark Tatulli’s Heart of the City for the 26th places itself on my Grand Avenue warning board. There’s plenty of time for things to go a different way but right now it’s set up for a toxic little presentation of mathematics. Heart, after being grounded, was caught sneaking out to a slumber party and now her mother is sending her to two weeks of Math Camp. I’m supposing, from Tatulli’s general attitude about how stuff happens in Heart and in Lio that Math Camp will not be a horrible, penal experience. But it’s still ominous talk and I’m watching.

Brian Fies’s Mom’s Cancer story for the 26th is part of the strip’s rerun on GoComics. (Many comic strips that have ended their run go into eternal loops on GoComics.) This is one of the strips with mathematical content. The spatial dimension of a thing implies relationships between the volume (area, hypervolume, whatever) of a thing and its characteristic linear measure, its diameter or radius or side length. It can be disappointing.

Nicholas Gurewitch’s Perry Bible Fellowship for the 26th is a repeat of one I get on my mathematics Twitter friends now and then. Should warn, it’s kind of racy content, at least as far as my usual recommendations here go. It’s also a little baffling because while the reveal of the unclad woman is funny … what, exactly, does it mean? The symbols don’t mean anything; they’re just what fits graphically. I think the strip is getting at Dr Loring not being able to see even a woman presenting herself for sex as anything but mathematics. I guess that’s funny, but it seems like the idea isn’t quite fully developed.

Zach Weinersmith’s Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal Again for the 26th has a mathematician snort about plotting a giraffe logarithmically. This is all about representations of figures. When we plot something we usually start with a linear graph: a couple of axes perpendicular to one another. A unit of movement in the direction of any of those axes represents a constant difference in whatever that axis measures. Something growing ten units larger, say. That’s fine for many purposes. But we may want to measure something that changes by a power law, or that grows (or shrinks) exponentially. Or something that has some region where it’s small and some region where it’s huge. Then we might switch to a logarithmic plot. Here the same difference in space along the axis represents a change that’s constant in proportion: something growing ten times as large, say. The effective result is to squash a shape down, making the higher points more nearly flat.

And to completely smother Weinersmith’s fine enough joke: I would call that plot semilogarithmically. I’d use a linear scale for the horizontal axis, the gazelle or giraffe head-to-tail. But I’d use a logarithmic scale for the vertical axis, ears-to-hooves. So, linear in one direction, logarithmic in the other. I’d be more inclined to use “logarithmic” plots to mean logarithms in both the horizontal and the vertical axes. Those are useful plots for turning up power laws, like the relationship between a planet’s orbital radius and the length of its year. Relationships like that turn into straight lines when both axes are logarithmically spaced. But I might also describe that as a “log-log plot” in the hopes of avoiding confusion.