I intend to be back to regular mathematics-based posts soon. I had a fine idea for a couple posts based on Sunday’s closing of the Diaster Transport roller coaster ride at Cedar Point, actually, although I have to technically write them first. (My bride and I made a trip to the park to get a last ride in before its closing, and that lead to inspiration.) But reviews of math-touching comic strips are always good for my readership, if I’m readin the statistics page here right, so let’s see what’s come up since the last recap, going up to the 14th of July.
Tag: logical fallacy
A Night In Wonderland
haggisthesheep here offers a pleasant report about a math-oriented event in the National Museum of Scotland recently. The theme was “A Night In Wonderland”, which is probably almost inevitable, since mathematicians really, really like that (a) people have heard of Lewis Carrol, (b) he can be fairly described as a mathematician, and (c) people aren’t scared of mathematics when it’s presented as Lewis Carroll clowning around.
I recall flipping through one of his logic books and finding a delightful demonstration of how the conclusion may be true while the arguments are not — I believe it was “if a person is late for a train, then he will be running” and “the man is running”, doesn’t prove he’s late for the train, because he might be being chased by a tiger. A good tiger chase livens up any discussion of logic.
On 18th May I was lucky enough to get involved with my first RBS Museum Lates at the National Museum of Scotland. These events happen about 3 times a year and are a chance for the (over 18) public to come back into the museum after hours and to get cosy with the exhibits with a cocktail and live band. It’s also a chance for science (and arts!) communicators like me to run an activity and get some surreptitious education into the evening.
The theme for this month’s Museum Late was “A Night in Wonderland”, so there were lots of top hats, white rabbits and red queens! (See lots of photos of the event on the Museum’s Flickr page.) Knowing that Lewis Carroll (real name Charles Dodgson) was a mathematician and logician as well as nonsense-poem writer, it seemed wrong for there not to be a mathematical component to…
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Reading The Comics, May 20, 2012
Since I suspect that the comics roundup posts are the most popular ones I post, I’m very glad to see there was a bumper crop of strips among the ones I read regularly (from King Features Syndicate and from gocomics.com) this past week. Some of those were from cancelled strips in perpetual reruns, but that’s fine, I think: there aren’t any particular limits on how big an electronic comics page one can have, after all, and while it’s possible to read a short-lived strip long enough that you see all its entries, it takes a couple go-rounds to actually have them all memorized.
The first entry, and one from one of these cancelled strips, comes from Mark O’Hare’s Citizen Dog, a charmer of a comic set in a world-plus-talking-animals strip. In this case Fergus has taken the place of Maggie, a girl who’s not quite ready to come back from summer vacation. It’s also the sort of series of questions that it feels like come at the start of any class where a homework assignment’s due.
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