Reading The Comics, May 22, 2015: Might Be Giving Up Mickey Mouse Edition

We’re drawing upon the end of the school year, on the United States calendar. Comic Strip Master Command may have ordered fewer mathematically-themed comic strips to be run. That’s all right. I have plans. I also may need to stop paying attention to the Disney comic strips, reruns of Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck. I explain why within.

Niklas Eriksson’s Carpe Diem for the 16th of May, 2015.

Niklas Eriksson’s Carpe Diem made its first appearance in my pages here on the 16th of May. (It’s been newly introduced to United States comics. I’m sorry, I just can’t read all the syndicated newspaper comic strips in the world for mathematical content. If someone wants to franchise the Reading The Comics idea for a country they like, let’s talk. We can negotiate reasonable terms.) Anyway, it uses the usual string of mathematical symbols to express the idea of a lot of hard mathematical work. The big down-arrow just before superstar equation E = mc² is authentic enough. Trying to show the chain of thought, or to point out the conclusions one hopes follow from the work done, is a common part of discovering or inventing mathematics.

Mike Peters’s Mother Goose and Grimm for the 17th of May, 2015. Note: the claim in the second and third panels is transparent nonsense. But it’s a comic strip, after all.

Mike Peters’s Mother Goose and Grimm (May 17) riffs on that ancient and transparently stupid bit of folklore about the chance of an older woman having a better chance of dying in some improbable manner than of marrying successfully. It’s always been obvious nonsense and people passing along the claim uncritically should be ashamed of themselves. I’ll give Peters a pass since the point is to set up a joke, and joke-setup can get away with a lot. Still.

Reading the Comics, May 14, 2015: At The Cash Register Edition

This might not be the most exciting week of mathematically-themed comic strips. But it gives me the chance to be more autobiographical than usual. And it’s got more reruns than average, too.

Also, I’m trying out a new WordPress Theme. I’m a little suspicious of it myself, but will see what I think of it a week from now. Don’t worry, I remember the name of the old one in case I want to go back. Also, WordPress Master Command: stop hiding the option to live-preview themes instead of switching to them right away.

Norm Feuti’s Retail For the 11th of May, 2015.

Norm Feuti’s Retail (May 11) led off a week of “Epic Customer Fails” with an arithmetic problem. My own work in retail was so long ago and for so short a time I don’t remember this happening. But I can believe in a customer being confused this way. I think there is a tendency to teach arithmetic problems as a matter of “pick out the numbers, pick out the operation, compute that”. This puts an emphasis placed on computing quickly. That seems to invite too-quick calculation of not-quite the right things. That percentages are a faintly exotic construct to many people doesn’t help either.

My own retail customers-with-percentages story is duller. A customer asked about a book, I believe an SAT preparation book, which had a 20 percent (or whatever) off sticker. He specifically wanted to know whether 20 percent was taken off the price before the sales tax (6 percent) was calculated, or whether the registers added the sales tax and then took 20 percent off that total. I tried to reassure him that it didn’t matter, the resulting price would be the same. He tried to reassure me that it did matter because the sales tax should be calculated on the price paid, not reduced afterward. I believed, then and now, that he was right legally, but for the practical point of how much he had to pay it made no difference.

He judged me warily, but I worked out what the price paid would be, and he let me ring the book up. And the price came out about a dollar too high. The bar code had a higher price for the book than the plain-english corner said. He snorted “Ha!” and may have told me so. I explained the problem, showing the bar code version of the price (it’s in the upper-right corner of the bar code on books) and the price I’d used to calculate. He repeated that this was why he had asked, while I removed the wrong price and entered the thing manually so I could put in the lower price. And took the 20 percent off, and added sales tax, which came out to what I had said the price was.

I don’t believe I ever saw him again, but I would like the world to know that I was right. And the SAT prep book-maker needed to not screw up their bar codes.