Reading the Comics, December 9, 2019: It’s A Slow Week Edition, Part II

And here’s the rest of last week’s mathematically-themed comic strips. On reflection, none of them are so substantially about the mathematics they mention for me to go into detail. Again, Comic Strip Master Command is helping me rebuild my energies after the A-to-Z wrapped up. I appreciate it, folks, but would like, you know, two or three strips a week I can sink my teeth into.

Charles Schulz’s Peanuts rerun for the 11th sees Sally Brown working out metric system unit conversions. The strip originally ran the 13th of December, 1972, a year when people in the United States briefly thought there might ever be a reason to use the prefix “deci-” for something besides decibels. “centi-” for anything besides “centimeter” is pretty dodgy too.

Rick Detorie’s One Big Happy for the 13th is a strip about percentages, and the question of whether a percentage over 100 can be meaningful. I’m solidly in the camp that says “of course it can be”.

Zach Weinersmith’s Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal for the 13th is titled “Do Not Date A Mathematician”. This seems personal. The point here is the mathematician believing her fiancee has “demonstrated a poor understanding of probability” by declaring his belief in soulmates. The joke seems to be missing some key points, though. Just declaring a belief in soulmates doesn’t say anything about his understanding of probability. If we suppose that he believed every person had exactly one soulmate, and that these soulmates were uniformly distributed across the world’s population, and that people routinely found their soulmates. But if those assumptions aren’t made then you can’t say that the fiancee is necessarily believing in something improbable.

Lincoln Peirce’s Big Nate: First Class sees Nate looking for help with his mathematics homework. The strip originally ran the 16th of December, 1994.

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And that covers the comic strips of last week! I figure on Sunday to have a fresh Reading the Comics post at this link. And I’m thinking whether, or what, to have later this week. Thanks for reading.

Reading the Comics, April 1, 2014: Name-Dropping Monkeys Edition

There’s been a little rash of comics that bring up mathematical themes, now, which is ordinarily pretty good news. But when I went back to look at my notes I realized most of them are pretty much name-drops, mentioning stuff that’s mathematical without giving me much to expand upon. The exceptions are what might well be the greatest gift which early 20th century probability could give humor writers. That’s enough for me.

Mark Anderson’s Andertoons (March 27) plays on the double meaning of “fifth” as representing a term in a sequence and as representing a reciprocal fraction. It also makes me realize that I hadn’t paid attention to the fact that English (at least) lets you get away with using the ordinal number for the part fraction, at least apart from “first” and “second”. I can make some guesses about why English allows that, but would like to avoid unnecessarily creating folk etymologies.

Hector D Cantu and Carlos Castellanos’s Baldo (March 27) has Baldo not do as well as he expected in predictive analytics, which I suppose doesn’t explicitly require mathematics, but would be rather hard to do without. Making predictions is one of mathematics’s great applications, and drives much mathematical work, in the extrapolation of curves and the solving of differential equations most obviously.

Dave Whamond’s Reality Check (March 27) name-drops the New Math, in the service of the increasingly popular sayings that suggest Baby Boomers aren’t quite as old as they actually are.

Rick Stromoski’s Soup To Nutz (March 29) name-drops the metric system, as Royboy notices his ten fingers and ten toes and concludes that he is indeed metric. The metric system is built around base ten, of course, and the idea that changing units should be as easy as multiplying and dividing by powers of ten, and powers of ten are easy to multiply and divide by because we use base ten for ordinary calculations. And why do we use base ten? Almost certainly because most people have ten fingers and ten toes, and it’s so easy to make the connection between counting fingers, counting objects, and then to the abstract idea of counting. There are cultures that used other numerical bases; for example, the Maya used base 20, but it’s hard not to notice that that’s just using fingers and toes together.

Greg Cravens’s The Buckets (March 30) brings out a perennial mathematics topic, the infinite monkeys. Here Toby figures he could be the greatest playwright by simply getting infinite monkeys and typewriters to match, letting them work, and harvesting the best results. He hopes that he doesn’t have to buy many of them, to spoil the joke, but the remarkable thing about the infinite monkeys problem is that you don’t actually need that many monkeys. You’ll get the same result — that, eventually, all the works of Shakespeare will be typed — with one monkey or with a million or with infinitely many monkeys; with fewer monkeys you just have to wait longer to expect success. Tim Rickard’s Brewster Rockit (April 1) manages with a mere hundred monkeys, although he doesn’t reach Shakespearean levels.

But making do with fewer monkeys is a surprisingly common tradeoff in random processes. You can often get the same results with many agents running for a shorter while, or a few agents running for a longer while. Processes that allow you to do this are called “ergodic”, and being able to prove that a process is ergodic is good news because it means a complicated system can be represented with a simple one. Unfortunately it’s often difficult to prove that something is ergodic, so you might instead just warn that you are assuming the ergodic hypothesis or ergodicity, and if nothing else you can probably get a good fight going about the validity of “ergodicity” next time you play Scrabble or Boggle.

How Fast Is The Earth Spinning?

To get to my next point about Arthur Christmas I needed to know how fast an arbitrary point on the Earth is moving, as the Earth rotates. This required me getting out a sheet of paper and doing some sketches, so, I figured it’s worth a side article to explain what I was doing.

The first thing was that I simplified stuff. In particular, I decided the Earth is near enough a sphere that I’m not bothering with the fact that it isn’t. The difference between an actual sphere and the geoid is not worth bothering with unless you’re timing the retrofire for a ballistically-reentering space capsule. That’s … actually fairly close to the problem I want, about how long it might take the reindeer and sleigh to get back to Arthur Christmas and Grand-Santa, but that’s also too much work for the improvement in the answer I’d get.

Reading the Comics, January 16, 2013

I was beginning to wonder whether my declaration last time that I’d post a comics review every time I had seven to ten strips to talk about was going to see the extinguishing of math-themed comic strips. It only felt like it. The boom-and-bust cycle continues, though; it took better than two weeks to get six such strips, and then three more came in two days. But that’s the fun of working on relatively rare phenomena. Let me get to the most recent installment of math-themed comics, mostly from Gocomics.com:

Bases For Comparison

Back to the theme of divisibility of numbers. Since we have the idea of writing numbers with a small set of digits, and with the place of those digits carrying information about how big the number is, we can think about what’s implied by that information.

In the number 222, the first two is matched to blocks (hundreds) that are ten times as large as those for the second two (tens), and the second two is matched to units (tens) which are ten times as large as those for the third two (units). It is now extremely rare to have the size of those blocks differ from one place to the next; that is, a number before the initial two here we take without needing it made explicit to represent ten times that hundreds unit, and a number after the final two (and therefore after the decimal point) would represent units which are one-tenth that of the final two’s size.

It has also become extremely rare for the relationship between blocks to be anything but a factor of ten, with two exceptions which I’ll mention next paragraph. The only block other than those with common use which comes to my mind is the sixty-to-one division of hours or degrees into minutes, and then of minutes into seconds. Even there the division of degrees of arc into minutes and seconds might be obsolete, as it’s so much easier on the computer to enter a latitude and longitude with decimals instead. So blocks of ten, decimals, it is, or in the way actual people speak of such things, a number written in base ten.