## Reading the Comics, April 24, 2019: Mic Drop Edition Edition

I can’t tell you how hard it is not to just end this review of last week’s mathematically-themed comic strips after the first panel here. It really feels like the rest is anticlimax. But here goes.

John Deering’s Strange Brew for the 20th is one of those strips that’s not on your mathematics professor’s office door only because she hasn’t seen it yet. The intended joke is obvious, mixing the tropes of the Old West with modern research-laboratory talk. “Theoretical reckoning” is a nice bit of word juxtaposition. “Institoot” is a bit classist in its rendering, but I suppose it’s meant as eye-dialect.

What gets it a place on office doors is the whiteboard, though. They’re writing out mathematics which looks legitimate enough to me. It doesn’t look like mathematics though. What’s being written is something any mathematician would recognize. It’s typesetting instructions. Mathematics requires all sorts of strange symbols and exotic formatting. In the old days, we’d handle this by giving the typesetters hazard pay. Or, if you were a poor grad student and couldn’t afford that, deal with workarounds. Maybe just leave space in your paper and draw symbols in later. If your university library has old enough papers you can see them. Maybe do your best to approximate mathematical symbols using ASCII art. So you get expressions that look something like this:

  / 2 pi
|   2
|  x cos(theta) dx - 2 F(theta) == R(theta)
|
/ 0


This gets old real fast. Mercifully, Donald Knuth, decades ago, worked out a great solution. It uses formatting instructions that can all be rendered in standard, ASCII-available text. And then by dark incantations and summoning of Linotype demons, re-renders that as formatted text. It handles all your basic book formatting needs — much the way HTML, used for web pages, will — and does mathematics much more easily. For example, I would enter a line like:

\int_{0}^{2\pi} x^2 \cos(\theta) dx - 2 F(\theta) \equiv R(\theta)


And this would be rendered in print as:

$\int_{0}^{2\pi} x^2 \cos(\theta) dx - 2 F(\theta) \equiv R(\theta)$

There are many, many expansions available to this, to handle specialized needs, hardcore mathematics among them.

Anyway, the point that makes me realize John Deering was aiming at everybody with an advanced degree in mathematics ever with this joke, using a string of typesetting instead of the usual equations here?

The typesetting language is named TeX.

Mark Anderson’s Andertoons for the 21st is the Mark Anderson’s Andertoons for the week. It’s about one of those questions that nags at you as a kid, and again periodically as an adult. The perimeter is the boundary around a shape. The circumference is the boundary around a circle. Why do we have two words for this? And why do we sound all right talking about either the circumference or the perimeter of a circle, while we sound weird talking about the circumference of a rhombus? We sound weird talking about the perimeter of a rhombus too, but that’s the rhombus’s fault.

The easy part is why there’s two words. Perimeter is a word of Greek origin; circumference, of Latin. Perimeter entered the English language in the early 15th century; circumference in the 14th. Why we have both I don’t know; my suspicion is either two groups of people translating different geometry textbooks, or some eager young Scholastic with a nickname like ‘Doctor Magnifico Triangulorum’ thought Latin sounded better. Perimeter stuck with circules early; every etymology I see about why we use the symbol π describes it as shorthand for the perimeter of the circle. Why `circumference’ ended up the word for circles or, maybe, ellipses and ovals and such is probably the arbitrariness of language. I suspect that opening “circ” sound cues people to think of it for circles and circle-like shapes, in a way that perimeter doesn’t. But that is my speculation and should not be mistaken for information.

Steve McGarry’s KidTown for the 21st is a kids’s information panel with a bit of talk about representing numbers. And, in discussing things like how long it takes to count to a million or a billion, or how long it would take to type them out, it gets into how big these numbers can be. Les Stewart typed out the English names of numbers, in words, by the way. He’d also broken the Australian record for treading water, and for continuous swimming.

Gary Delainey and Gerry Rasmussen’s Betty for the 24th is a sudoku comic. Betty makes the common, and understandable, conflation of arithmetic with mathematics. But she’s right in identifying sudoku as a logical rather than an arithmetic problem. You can — and sometimes will see — sudoku type puzzles rendered with icons like stars and circles rather than numerals. That you can make that substitution should clear up whether there’s arithmetic involved. Commenters at GoComics meanwhile show a conflation of mathematics with logic. Certainly every mathematician uses logic, and some of them study logic. But is logic mathematics? I’m not sure it is, and our friends in the philosophy department are certain it isn’t. But then, if something that a recognizable set of mathematicians study as part of their mathematics work isn’t mathematics, then we have a bit of a logic problem, it seems.

Come Sunday I should have a fresh Reading the Comics essay available at this link.

I apologize for a post rougher than my norm. It has not been a gentle week. I am carrying on as best I can, but then, who isn’t? There is a common element to three of the strips featured this time around, so I have a meaningful name.

Steve McGarry’s KidTown for the 22nd of July is a kids-information panel. It’s a delivery system for some neat trivia about numbers. I’d never encountered the bit about the factorial of 10 (10 x 9 x 8 x 7 x 6 x 5 x 4 x 3 x 2 x 1) being as many seconds as there are in six weeks. I’m curious how I missed that. But it’s definitely one of those slightly useful bits of calendar mathematics to keep around. Some other useful ones are that three years is about 1100 days, and that a century is about three billion seconds. That line about 12 + 3 – 4 + 5 + 67 + 8 + 9 is probably a useful answer to some mathematics riddle such as might beset Nancy.

John Zakour and Scott Roberts’s Maria’s Day for the 23rd depicts Maria misunderstanding what it is to be bad at mathematics. The Star Wars movie episode numbers show a quirky indexing scheme, yes. But the numbers in this case are mostly nominal variables. If we spoke of the movies only by their titles … well, it would be harder to guess whether The Empire Strikes Back or Return of the Jedi came first. All the names suggest is that they ought to follow on something else happening beforehand. And people would likely use numbers for shorthand anyway. Star Trek fans talk still about the odd- and even-numbered movies, even though no Star Trek movie’s had a number attached to it since 1991.

A nominal variable is as the … er … name suggests. It’s a way to reference something, but the value doesn’t mean very much. We see these, often with numbers attached, often enough to not notice it. We start to realize it when we have those moments of thinking, isn’t it odd that the office building starts numbering rooms from 101, rather than, say, 1? Or that there’s no numbers between (say) 129 and 201? Using a number carries some information, in that it suggests we think there is a preferred order for things. But your neighborhood would be no different if all the building addresses were 1000 higher, and the Star Wars movies would be no different if the one from 1977 came to be dubbed Episode 14 instead.

(I am open to an argument that the Star Wars episode numbers are ordinal variables. This is why I hedged by calling them “mostly” nominal. An ordinal variable describes some preferred order for the things. The difference between numbers isn’t particularly meaningful, just the relationship between them. And, yeah, it would be peculiar if The Empire Strikes Back had a higher episode number than did Return of the Jedi. Viewing the movies in that order would create several apparent continuity errors. But there are differences between internal chronology and production order and other ways one might watch the movies. But it seems to me the ordinary use for the numbers, if someone uses them at all, is as a label.)

Mell Lazarus’s Momma for the 23rd is another strip built on people being bad at mathematics. Arithmetic, anyway. I’m not sure this quite counts as an arithmetic joke. Granting the (correct) assumption that an episode of 60 Minutes is ordinarily 60 minutes long, is not recognizing how long the show will take really a use of mathematics? Isn’t it more reading comprehension? … And to be fair to the ever-beleaguered Francis, it’s rather more likely 60 Minutes just had one segment about grown men incapable of doing arithmetic. Asking how long that is likely to take is a fair question.

Adrian Raeside’s The Other Coast for the 23rd is another strip conflating arithmetic skill with intelligence. And intelligence with fitness. It’s flattering stuff, at least for people who are good at arithmetic and who feel flattered to be called intelligent. But there’s a lot of presumption here. And a common despicable attitude: merry little eugenicists (they’re always cheery about it, aren’t they?) always conclude they are fit ones.

Other essays that discuss topics raised in KidTown are on this link. When I’ve had cause to discuss Maria’s Day those essays are here. Other times I’ve talked about Momma should be on this link. And other essays that mention The Other Coast should be on this link. It’s a new tag, so it might take some time to get other entries.

As ever, the whole set of Reading the Comics posts should be at this link.

## 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.