Reading the Comics, May 2, 2017: Puzzle Week

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reading the Comics, January 14, 2017: Maybe The Last Jumble? Edition

So now let me get to the other half of last week’s comics. Also, not to spoil things, but this coming week is looking pretty busy so I may have anothe split-week Reading the Comics coming up. The shocking thing this time is that the Houston Chronicle has announced it’s discontinuing its comics page. I don’t know why; I suppose because they’re fed up with people coming loyally to a daily feature. I will try finding alternate sources for the things I had still been reading there, but don’t know if I’ll make it.

I’m saddened by this. Back in the 90s comics were just coming onto the Internet. The Houston Chronicle was one of a couple newspapers that knew what to do with them. It, and the Philadelphia Inquirer and the San Jose Mercury-News, had exactly what we wanted in comics: you could make a page up of all the strips you wanted to read, and read them on a single page. You could even go backwards day by day in case you missed some. The Philadelphia Inquirer was the only page that let you put the comics in the order you wanted, as opposed to alphabetical order by title. But if you were unafraid of opening up URLs you could reorder the Houston Chronicle page you built too.

And those have all faded away. In the interests of whatever interest is served by web site redesigns all these papers did away with their user-buildable comics pages. The Chronicle was the last holdout, but even they abolished their pages a few years ago, with a promise for a while that they’d have a replacement comics-page scheme up soon. It never came and now, I suppose, never will.

Most of the newspapers’ sites had become redundant anyway. Comics Kingdom and GoComics.com offer user-customizable comics pages, with a subscription model that makes it clear that money ought to be going to the cartoonists. I still had the Chronicle for a few holdouts, like Joe Martin’s strips or the Jumble feature. And from that inertia that attaches to long-running Internet associations.

So among the other things January 2017 takes away from us, it is taking the last, faded echo of the days in the 1990s when newspapers saw comics as awesome things that could be made part of their sites.

Lorie Ransom’s The Daily Drawing for the 11th is almost but not quite the anthropomorphized-numerals joke for this installment. It’s certainly the most numerical duck content I’ve got on record.

Tom II Wilson’s Ziggy for the 11th is an Early Pi Day joke. Cosmically there isn’t any reason we couldn’t use π in take-a-number dispensers, after all. Their purpose is to give us some certain order in which to do things. We could use any set of numbers which can be put in order. So the counting numbers work. So do the integers. And the real numbers. But practicality comes into it. Most people have probably heard that π is a bit bigger than 3 and a fair bit smaller than 4. But pity the two people who drew and figuring out who gets to go first. Still, I won’t be surprised if some mathematics-oriented place uses a gimmick like this, albeit with numbers that couldn’t be confused. At least not confused by people who go to mathematics-oriented places. That would be for fun rather than cake.

the Jumble for the 11th of January, 2017. This link’s all but sure to die the 1st of February, so, sorry about that. Mesopotamia did have the abacus, although I don’t know that the depiction is anything close to what the actual ones looked like. I’d imagine they do, at least within the limits of what will be an understandable drawing.

I can’t promise that the Jumble for the 11th is the last one I’ll ever feature here. I might find where David L Hoyt and Jeff Knurek keep a linkable reference to their strips and point to them. But just in case of the worst here’s an abacus gag for you to work on.

Corey Pandolph, Phil Frank, and Joe Troise’s The Elderberries for the 12th is, I have to point out, a rerun. So if you’re trying to do the puzzle the reference to “the number of the last president” isn’t what you’re thinking of. It is an example of the conflation of intelligence with skill at arithmetic. It’s also an example the conflation of intelligence with a mastery of trivia. But I think it leans on arithmetic more. I am not sure when this strip first appeared. “The last president” might have been Bill Clinton (42) or George W Bush (43). But this means we’re taking the square root of either 33 or 34. And there’s no doing that in your head. The square root of a whole number is either a whole number — the way the square root of 36 is — or else it’s an irrational number. You can work out the square root of a non-perfect-square by hand. But it’s boring and it’s worse than just writing “” or “”. Except in figuring out if that number is larger than or smaller than five or six. It’s good for that.

Dave Blazek’s Loose Parts for the 13th is the actuary joke for this installment. Actuarial studies are built on one of the great wonders of statistics: that it is possible to predict how often things will happen. They can happen to a population, as in forecasts of how many people will be in traffic accidents or fires or will lose their jobs or will move to a new city. We may have no idea to whom any of these will happen, and they may have no way of guessing, but the enormous number of people and great number of things that can combine to make a predictable state of affairs. I suppose it’s imaginable that a group could study its dynamics well enough to identify who screws up the most and most seriously. So they might be able to say what the odds are it is his fault. But I imagine in practice it’s too difficult to define screw-ups or to assign fault consistently enough to get the data needed.

Zach Weinersmith’s Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal for the 14th is another multiverse strip, echoing the Dinosaur Comics I featured here Sunday. I’ll echo my comments then. If there is a multiverse — again, there is not evidence for this — then there may be infinitely many versions of every book of the Bible. This suggests, but it does not mandate, that there should be every possible incarnation of the Bible. And a multiverse might be a spendthrift option anyway. Just allow for enough editions, and the chance that any of them will have a misprint at any word or phrase, and we can eventually get infinitely many versions of every book of the Bible. If we wait long enough.

Reading the Comics, October 22, 2016: The Jokes You Can Make About Fractions Edition

Last week had a whole bundle and a half of mathematically-themed comics so let me finish off the set. Also let me refresh my appeal for words for my End Of 2016 Mathematics A To Z. There’s all sorts of letters not yet claimed; please think of a mathematical term and request it!

David L Hoyt and Jeff Knurek’s Jumble for the 19th gives us a chance to do some word puzzle games again. If you like getting the big answer without doing the individual words then pay attention to the blackboard in the comic. Just saying.

David L Hoyt and Jeff Knurek’s Jumble for the 19th of October, 2016. The link will probably expire in about a month. Have to say, it’s not a big class. I’m not surprised the students are doing well.

Patrick J Marran’s Francis for the 20th features origami, as well as some of the more famous polyhedrons. The study of what shapes you can make from a flat sheet by origami processes — just folding, no cutting — is a neat one. Apparently origami geometry can be built out of seven axioms. I’m delighted to learn that the axioms were laid out as recently as 1992, with the exception of one that went unnoticed until 2002.

Gabby describes her shape as an isocahedron, which must be a typo. We all make them. There’s icosahedrons which look like that figure and I’ve certainly slipped consonants around that way.

I’m surprised and delighted to find there are ways to make an origami icosahedron. Her figure doesn’t look much like the origami icosahedron of those instructions, but there are many icosahedrons. The name just means there are 20 faces to the polyhedron so there’s a lot of room for variants.

If you were wondering, yes, the Francis of the title is meant to be the Pope. It’s kind of a Pope Francis fan comic. I cannot explain this phenomenon.

Rick Detorie’s One Big Happy rerun for the 21st retells one of the standard jokes you can always make about fractions. Fortunately it uses that only as part of the setup, which shows off why I’ve long liked Detorie’s work. Good cartoonists — good writers — take a stock joke and add something to make it fit their characters.

I’ve featured Richard Thompson’s Poor Richard’s Almanac rerun from the 21st before. I’ll surely feature it again. I just like Richard Thompson art like this. This is my dubious inclusion of the essay. In “What’s New At The Zoo” he tosses off a mention of chimpanzees now typing at 120 words per minute. A comic reference to the famous thought experiment of a monkey, or a hundred monkeys, or infinitely many monkeys given typewriters and time to write all the works of literature? Maybe. Or it might just be that it’s a funny idea. It is, of course.

Rick Kirkman and Jerry Scott’s Baby Blues for the 22nd of October, 2016. I’m not quite curious enough to look, but do wonder how far into the comments you have to go before someone slags on the Common Core. But then I would say if Hammy were to write down first an initial-impression guess of about what the answer should be — say, that “37 + 42” should be a number somewhere around 80 — and then an exact answer, then that would be consistent with what I understand Common Core techniques encourage and a pretty solid approach.

In Rick Kirkman and Jerry Scott’s Baby Blues for the 22nd Hammie offers multiple answers to each mathematics problem. “I like to increase my odds,” he says. For arithmetic problems, that’s not really helping. But it is often useful, especially in modeling complicated systems, to work out multiple answers. If you’re not sure how something should behave, and it’s troublesome to run experiments, then try develop several different models. If the models all describe similar behavior, then, good! It’s reason to believe you’re probably right, or at least close to right. If the models disagree about their conclusions then you need information. You need experimental results. The ways your models disagree can inspire new experiments.

Mark Leiknes’s Cow and Boy rerun for the 22nd is another with one of the standard jokes you can make about fractions. I suspect I’ve featured this before too, but I quite like Cow and Boy. It’s sad that the strip was cancelled, and couldn’t make a go of it as web comic. I’m not surprised; the strip had so many running jokes it might as well have had a deer and an orca shooting rocket-propelled grenades at new readers. But it’s grand seeing the many, many, many running jokes as they were first established. This is part of the sequence in which Billy, the Boy of the title, discovers there’s another kid named Billy in the class, quickly dubbed Smart Billy for reasons the strip makes clear.

Reading the Comics, May 6, 2016: Mistakes Edition

I knew my readership would drop off after I fell back from daily posting. Apparently it was worse than I imagined and nobody read my little blog here over the weekend. That’s fair enough; I had to tend other things myself. Still, for the purpose of maximizing the number of page views around here, taking two whole days off in a row was a mistake. There’s some more discussed in this Reading The Comics installment.

Word problems are dull. At least at the primary-school level. There’s all these questions about trains going in different directions or ropes sweeping out areas or water filling troughs. So Aaron McGruder’s Boondocks rerun from the 5th of May (originally run the 22nd of February, 2001) is a cute change. It’s at least the start of a legitimate word problem, based on the ways the recording industry took advantage of artists in the dismal days of fifteen years ago. I’m sure that’s all been fixed by now. Fill in some numbers and the question might interest people.

Glenn McCoy and Gary McCoy’s The Duplex for the 5th of May is a misunderstanding-fractions joke. I’m amused by the idea of messing up quarter-pound burgers. But it also brings to mind a summer when I worked for the Great Adventure amusement park and got assigned one day as cashier at the Great American Hamburger Stand. Thing is, I didn’t know anything about the stand besides the data point that they probably sold hamburgers. So customers would order stuff I didn’t know, and I couldn’t find how to enter it on the register, and all told it was a horrible mess. If you were stuck in that impossibly slow-moving line, I am sorry, but it was management’s fault; I told them I didn’t know what I was even selling. Also I didn’t know the drink cup sizes so I just charged you for whatever you said and if I gave you the wrong size I hope it was more soda than you needed.

On a less personal note, I have heard the claim about why one-third-pound burgers failed in United States fast-food places. Several chains tried them out in the past decade and they didn’t last, allegedly because too many customers thought a third of a pound was less than a quarter pound and weren’t going to pay more for less beef. It’s … plausible enough, I suppose, because people have never been good with fractions. But I suspect the problem is more linguistic. A quarter-pounder has a nice rhythm to it. A half-pound burger is a nice strong order to say. A third-pound burger? The words don’t even sound right. You have to say “third-of-a-pound burger” to make it seem like English, and it’s a terribly weak phrase. The fast food places should’ve put their money into naming it something that suggested big-ness but not too-big-to-eat.

Mark Tatulli’s Heart of the City for the 5th is about Heart’s dread of mathematics. Her expressed fear, that making one little mistake means the entire answer is wrong, is true enough. But how how much is that “enough”? If you add together someting that should be (say) 18, and you make it out to be 20 instead, that is an error. But that’s a different sort of error from adding them together and getting 56 instead.

And errors propagate. At least they do in real problems, in which you are calculating something because you want to use it for something else. An arithmetic error on one step might grow, possibly quite large, with further steps. That’s trouble. This is known as an “unstable” numerical calculation, in much the way a tin of picric acid dropped from a great height onto a fire is an “unstable” chemical. The error might stay about as large as it started out being, though. And that’s less troublesome. A mistake might stay predictable. The calculation is “stable” In a few blessed cases an error might be minimized by further calculations. You have to arrange the calculations cleverly to make that possible, though. That’s an extremely stable calculation.

And this is important because we always make errors. At least in any real calculation we do. When we want to turn, say, a formula like πr² into a number we have to make a mistake. π is not 3.14, nor is it 3.141592, nor is it 3.14159265358979311599796346854418516. Does the error we make by turning π into some numerical approximation matter? It depends what we’re calculating, and how. There’s no escaping error and it might be a comfort to Heart, or any student, to know that much of mathematics is about understanding and managing error.

Joe Martin’s Boffo for the 6th of May, 2016. The link’s already expired, I bet. Yes, the panel did appear on a Sunday.

Joe Martin’s Boffo for the 6th of May is in its way about the wonder of very large numbers. On some reasonable assumptions — that our experience is typical, that nothing is causing traits to be concentrated one way or another — we can realize that we probably will not see any extreme condition. In this case, it’s about the most handsome men in the universe probably not even being in our galaxy. If the universe is large enough and people common enough in it, that’s probably right. But we likely haven’t got the least handsome either. Lacking reason to suppose otherwise we can guess that we’re in the vast middle.

David L Hoyt and Jeff Knurek’s Jumble for the 6th of May mentions mathematicians and that’s enough, isn’t it? Without spoiling the puzzle for anyone, I will say that “inocci” certainly ought to be a word meaning something. So get on that, word-makers.

David L Hoyt and Jeff Knurek’s Jumble for the 6th of May, 2016. While ‘ORFPO’ mey not be anything, I believe there should be some company named ‘OrfPro’ that offers some kind of service.

Dave Blazek’s Loose Parts for the 6th brings some good Venn Diagram humor back to my pages. Good. It’s been too long.

How, Arguably, Very Slightly Less Well April 2016 Treated My Mathematics Blog

So now to my review of readership statistics. I’d expected another strong month. If I’ve learned anything it’s that posting a lot of stuff regularly encourages readers. I got to have another month with more than 1,000 readers here. In fact, there were a neat 1,500 page views, according to WordPress. This is a bit lower than March’s 1,557 page views. But remember that March had one more day than April did, and so had one more article. April had an average of fifty page views per post. March had 50.226. That’s no appreciable difference, I figure. February had 949 page views, although with only 14 articles. (And so about 68 page views per article posted, somehow.)

The number of unique visitors, as WordPress makes them out, was up though. April saw 757 visitors, a record around these parts. March only had 734, and February a relatively skimpy 538.

The measurements that seem to reflect reader engagement were ambiguous as ever. The number of likes was 345, technically up from March’s 320, and well above February’s 201. The number of comments, though, was 55, plummeting from March’s 84 and February’s 66. Part of that is I didn’t have any good controversies like the Continued Fractions post this month. But writing articles that encourage conversations, especially conversations between commenters (it can’t all be me chatting with individuals), has never been a strength of mine and I do need to ponder ways to improve that.

Proud as I am of the A To Z series, I must face the facts: none of the essays was in my top five most-read articles for April. One does sneak in at sixth place so I’ll list the top six articles instead. I’m going to suppose that the series pretty much balances out. That is, few of the articles have reason to read that one instead of another post. What are most popular are Reading the Comics posts, my trapezoids thing, and a couple of pointers to other people’s writing. Well, we can’t all be stars; someone has to be the starmaker. Most read in April:

• A Girl’s Thoughts On Continued Fractions, pointing particularly to a new thrice-a-week blog.
• Reading the Comics, April 5, 2016: April 5, 2016 Edition including some Zippy the Pinhead stuff.
• Also, Some Mathematics Answers, Whatever Those Are, including some calculus stuff.
• the Comics, April 15, 2016: Remarkably, No Income Tax Comics Edition but, warning: Jumble content.
• How Many Trapezoids I Can Draw in which I still haven’t thought of a seventh. So, six.
• A Leap Day 2016 Mathematics A To Z: Quaternion, which I think fascinated people because it teased all kinds of weird new number-like constructs.

There’s not any interesting search terms this month. Well, all right, there’s “what is an inversly [sic] propotional [sic] dice”. But I don’t know what the searcher was looking for there. I got the traditional appearance of “origin is the gateway to your entire gaming universe.” And I got asked “what makes a basketball tournament exciting?” I don’t know, but I was able to give at least a non-perfectly-ridiculous measure of how interesting one might be.

And for the always-popular listing of countries? As is usual for some reason, the United States sent me the greatest number of page views: 863. India was second at 80, and Canada third at 61. Austria was next at 45, and the United Kingdom and Germany tied for 42.

Single-reader countries were Belarus, Botswana, China, Dominican Republic, European Union, Greece, Guatemala, Hungary, Kuwait, Poland, Portugal, Qatar, Réunion, Serbia, South Korea, and Switzerland. Again, European Union. I’ve said that before. China, European Union, and Greece were there last month too. The European Union is somehow on a five-month single-reader streak. At this point I have to think whoever is doing it is doing so on purpose and for a bit of a giggle.

The month begins with 36,256 page views total, from 14,273 recorded visitors. I’ve reportedly got 579 WordPress readers, up from the 573 at the start of April, despite putting the Follow This Blog icon in a more prominent location. Well, there were some nice stretches of people following each of several days in a row and that’s something. It also lists eleven followers by e-mail, up from ten last month. Again, it’s all something.

Reading the Comics, December 13, 2015: More Nearly Like It Edition

This has got me closer to the number of comics I like for a Reading the Comics post. There’s two comics already in my file, for the 14th of December, but those can wait until later in the week.

David L Hoyt and Jeff Knurek’s Jumble for the 11th of December has a mathematics topic. The quotes in the final answer are the hint that it’s a bit of wordplay. The mention of “subtraction” is a hint.

David L Hoyt and Jeff Knurek’s Jumble for the 11th of December, 2015. The link will probably expire in mid-January 2016. Also somehow I’m writing about 2016 being in the imminent future.

Brian Kliban’s cartoon for the 11th of December (a rerun from who knows when) promises an Illegal Cube Den, and delivers. I’m just delighted by the silliness of it all.

Greg Evans’s Luann Againn for the 11th of December reprints the 1987 Luann. “Geometric principles of equitorial [sic] astronomical coordinate systems” gets mentioned as a math-or-physics-sounding complicated thing to do. The basic idea is to tell where things are in the sky, as we see them from the surface of the Earth. In an equatorial coordinate system we imagine — we project — where the plane of the equator is, and we can measure things as north or south of that plane. (North is on the same side that the Earth’s north pole is.) That celestial equator is functionally equivalent to longitude, although it’s called declination.

We also need something functionally equivalent to longitude; that’s called the right ascension. To define that, we need something that works like the prime meridian. Projecting the actual prime meridian out to the stars doesn’t work. The prime meridian is spinning every 24 hours and we can’t publish updated star charts that quickly. What we use as a reference meridian instead is spring. That is, it’s where the path of the sun in the sky crosses the celestial equator in March and the (northern hemisphere) spring.

There are catches and subtleties, which is why this makes for a good research project. The biggest one is that this crossing point changes over time. This is because the Earth’s orbit around the sun changes. So right ascensions of points change a little every year. So when we give coordinates, we have to say in which system, and which reference year. 2000 is a popular one these days, but its time will pass. 1950 and 1900 were popular in their generations. It’s boring but not hard to convert between these reference dates. And if you need this much precision, it’s not hard to convert between the reference year of 2000 and the present year. I understand many telescopes will do that automatically. I don’t know directly because I have little telescope experience, and I couldn’t even swear I had seen a meteor until 2013. In fairness, I grew up in New Jersey, so with the light pollution I was lucky to see night sky.

Peter Maresca’s Origins of the Sunday Comics for the 11th of December showcases a strip from 1914. That, Clare Victor Dwiggins’s District School for the 12th of April, 1914, is just a bunch of silly vignettes. It’s worth zooming in to look at. It’s got a student going “figger juggling” and that gives me an excuse to point out the strip to anyone who’ll listen.

Samson’s Dark Side of the Horse for the 13th of December enters another counting-sheep joke into the ranks. Tying it into angles is cute. It’s tricky to estimate angles by sight. I think people tend to over-estimate how big an angle is when it’s around fifteen or twenty degrees. 45 degrees is easy enough to tell by sight. But for angles smaller than that, I tend to estimate angles by taking the number I think it is and cutting it in half, and I get closer to correct. I’m sure other people use a similar trick.

Brian Anderson’s Dog Eat Doug for the 13th of December has the dog, Sophie, deploy a lot of fraction talk to confuse a cookie out of Doug. A lot of new fields of mathematics are like that the first time you encounter them. I am curious where Sophie’s reasoning would have led, if not interrupted. How much cookie might she have cadged by the judicious splitting of halves and quarters and, perhaps, eighths and such? I’m not sure where her patter was going.

Shannon Wheeler’s Too Much Coffee Man for the 13th of December uses the traditional blackboard full of symbols to denote a lot of deeply considered thinking. Did you spot the error?

Reading the Comics, March 26, 2015: Kind Of Hanging Around Edition

I’m sorry to have fallen silent the last few days; it’s been a bit busy and I’ve been working on follow-ups to a couple of threads. Fortunately Comic Strip Master Command is still around and working to make sure I don’t disappear altogether, and I have a selection of comic strips which at least include a Jumble world puzzle, which should be a fun little diversion.

Tony Rubino and Gary Markstein’s Daddy’s Home (March 23) asks what seems like a confused question to me, “if you believe in infinity, does that mean anything is possible?” As I say, I’m not sure I understand how belief in infinity comes into play, but that might just reflect my background: I’ve been thoroughly convinced that one can describe collections of things that have infinitely many elements — the counting numbers, rectangles, continuous functions — as well as that one can subdivide things — like segments of a number line — infinitely many times — as well as of quantities that are larger than any finite number and so must be infinitely large; so, what’s to not believe in? (I’m aware that there are philosophical and theological questions that get into things termed “potential” and “actual” infinities, but I don’t understand the questions those terms are meant to address.) The phrasing of “anything is possible” seems obviously flawed to me. But if we take it to mean instead “anything not logically inconsistent or physically prohibited is possible” then we seem to have a reasonable question, if that hasn’t just reduced to “anything not impossible is possible”. I guess ultimately I just wonder if the kid is actually trying to understand anything or if he’s just procrastinating.

Reading the Comics, March 4, 2015: Driving Me Crazy Edition

I like it when there are themes to these collections of mathematical comics, but since I don’t decide what subjects cartoonists write about — Comic Strip Master Command does — it depends on luck and my ability to dig out loose connections to find any. Sometimes, a theme just drops into my lap, though, as with today’s collection: several cartoonists tossed off bits that had me double-checking their work and trying to figure out what it was I wasn’t understanding. Ultimately I came to the conclusion that they just made mistakes, and that’s unnerving since how could a mathematical error slip through the rigorous editing and checking of modern comic strips?

Mac and Bill King’s Magic in a Minute (March 1) tries to show off how to do a magic trick based on parity, using the spots on a die to tell whether it was turned in one direction or another. It’s a good gimmick, and parity — whether something is odd or even — can be a great way to encode information or to do simple checks against slight errors. That said, I believe the Kings made a mistake in describing the system: I can’t figure out how the parity of the three sides of a die facing you could not change, from odd to even or from even to odd, as the die is rotated one turn. I believe they mean that you should just count the dots on the vertical sides, so that for example in the “Howdy Do It?” panel in the lower right corner, add two and one to make three. But with that corrected it should be a good trick.

Reading the Comics, January 6, 2015: First of the Year Edition

I apologize for not writing as thoughtfully about the comics this week as I’d like, but it’s been a bit of a rushed week and I haven’t had the chance to do pop-mathematics writing of the kind I like, which is part of why you aren’t right now seeing a post about goldfish. All should be back to normal soon. I’m as ever not sure which is my favorite comic of the bunch this week; I think Bewley may have the strongest, if meanest, joke in it, though as you can see by the text Candorville gave me the most to think about.

Ryan Pagelow’s Buni (December 31) saw out the year with a touch of anthropomorphic-numerals business. Never worry, 4; your time will come again.

Daniel Beyer’s Long Story Short (January 1, 2015). Snoring humor.

Daniel Beyer’s Long Story Short (January 1) plays a little on the way a carelessly-written Z will morph so easily into a 2, and vice-versa, which serves as a reminder to the people who give out alphanumeric confirmation codes: stop using both 0’s and O’s, and 1’s and I’s, and 2’s and Z’s, in the same code already. I know in the database there’s no confusion about this but in the e-mail you sent out and in the note we wrote down at the airport transcribing this over the phone, there is. And now that it’s mentioned, why is the letter Z used to symbolize snoring? Nobody is sure, but Cecil Adams and The Straight Dope trace it back to the comics, with Rudolph Dirks’s The Katzenjammer Kids either the originator or at least the popularizer of the snoring Z.

Late April, Early May Math Comics

I’ve got enough new mathematics-themed comic strips to assemble them into a fresh post. It’s a challenge to time these rightly; I don’t want to waste everyone’s time with a set weekly post, particularly since the syndicated comics might just not have anything. On the other hand, waiting until a set number of strips have passed before my eyes seems likely to just encourage me to wonder how marginally a strip can touch mathematics before I include it. Dave Coverly’s Speed Bump, from the 6th of May, is a fine marginal case: there’s a mathematics problem in it, but it’s not at all a mathematics strip. It’s just very easy to put a math problem on the chalkboard and have it be understood the scenario is “student with no idea how to answer”.

Early April’s Math Comics

I had started to think the mathematics references in the comics pages were fading out and I might not have an installment to offer anytime soon. Then, on April 3, Pab Sugenis’s The New Adventures of Queen Victoria — a clip art comic strip which supposes the reader will recognize an illustration of King Edward VI — skipped its planned strip for the day (Sugenis’s choice, he says) and ran a Fuzzy Bunny Time strip calling on pretty much the expected rabbits and mathematics comic strip. (Some people in the Usenet group alt.fan.cecil-adams, which I read reliably and write to occasionally, say Sugenis was briefly a regular; perhaps so, but I don’t remember.) This would start a bumper crop of math strips for the week.