And here’s the last four comic strips from the final full week of 2019. I have already picked a couple strips for the end of December to say at least something about. Those I intend to wait for Sunday to review, though. And, as with the strips from this past Sunday, these are too slight for me to write much about. That’s all right. I don’t need the extra workload of thinking this week.
Doug Savage’s Savage Chickens for the 26th uses a blackboard of mathematics (as part of “understanding of particle physics”) as symbolic of intelligence. I’m not versed enough in particle physics to say whether the expressions make sense. I’m inclined toward it, since the first line has an integral of the reciprocal of the distance between a point x and a point x’. That looks to me like a calculation of some potential energy-related stuff.
Dana Simpson’s Phoebe and her Unicorn for the 27th uses “memorizing multiplication tables” as the sort of challenging and tedious task that a friend would not put another one through. The strip surprised me; I would have thought Phoebe the sort of kid who’d find multiplication tables, with their symmetry and teasing hints of structure (compare any number on the upper-left-to-lower-right diagonal to the numbers just up-and-right or down-and-left to it, for example), fascinating enough to memorize on their own.
Leigh Rubin’s Rubes for the 27th has a rat-or-mouse showing off one of those exciting calculations about how many rats-or-mice could breed in a year if absolutely nothing limited their growth. These sorts of calculations are fun for getting to big numbers in pretty little time. They’re only the first, loosest pieces of a model for anything’s population, though.
Pab Sungenis’s New Adventures of Queen Victoria for the 28th gets into the question about whether the new decade starts in 2020 or 2021. I wasn’t aware people were asking the question until a few weeks ago, when my father asked me for an authoritative answer. He respects my credentials as a mathematician and a calendar freak. The only answer I can defend, though, is to say of course a new decade starts in 2020. A new decade also starts in 2021. There’s also a decade starting in 2022. There’s a new decade starting five minutes from the moment you read this sentence. If you hurry you just might make it.
If you want to make any claims about “the” new decade, you have to say what you pick “the” to signify. Complete decades from the (proleptically defined) 1st of January, 1, is a compelling choice. “Years starting the 1st of January, 2020” is also a compelling choice. Decide your preference and you’ll decide your answer.
Thank you for reading, this essay and this whole year. 2020 is, of course, a leap year, or “bissextile year” if you want to establish your reputation as a calendar freak. Good luck.
As teased with the Andertoons I featured Tuesday, there’s some mathematics comics slight enough I can’t write paragraphs about them. But people like seeing comics that at least say “mathematics”, so here’s your heads-up to them.
Mark Parisi’s Off The Mark for the 18th is an anthropomorphic numerals joke. The numerals in a paint-by-numbers kit are really serving the role of indices, rather than anything numerical. The instructions would be the same if, say, a letter ‘p’ or a small square represented purple.
Jerry Bittle’s Shirley and Son rerun for the 20th has a kid impressed with Mom’s arithmetic skills. This is the first time Shirley and Son has gotten mention in a Reading the Comics post, which is not such a surprise to me.
Gene Mora’s Graffiti for the 23rd is also a spot of wordplay mentioning geometry. And it comes back to the joke about one shape being a kind of another that New Adventures of Queen Victoria was on about.
This wraps up last week’s comics. I plan to return Reading the Comics posts to Sunday finally, to make room Tuesdays and either Thursdays or Fridays for the Fall 2019 Mathematics A To Z. I’ve decided what A and B are going to be, but there’s still time to nominate concepts for the letters C through H. Thank you.
The temperature’s cooled. So let me get to the comics that, Saturday, I thought were substantial enough to get specific discussion. It’s possible I was overestimating how much there was to say about some of these. These are the risks I take.
Paige Braddock’s Jane’s World for the 15th sees Jane’s niece talk about enjoying mathematics. I’m glad to see. You sometimes see comic strip characters who are preposterously good at mathematics. Here I mean Jason and Marcus over in Bill Amend’s FoxTrot. But even they don’t often talk about why mathematics is appealing. There is no one answer for all people. I suspect even for a single person the biggest appeal changes over time. That mathematics seems to offer certainty, though, appeals to many. Deductive logic promises truths that can be known independent of any human failings. (The catch is actually doing a full proof, because that takes way too many boring steps. Mathematicians more often do enough of a prove to convince anyone that the full proof could be produced if needed.)
Alexa also enjoys math for there always being a right answer. Given her age there probably always is. There are mathematical questions for which there is no known right answer. Some of these are questions for which we just don’t know the answer, like, “is there an odd perfect number?” Some of these are more like value judgements, though. Is Euclidean geometry or non-Euclidean geometry more correct? The answer depends on what you want to do. There’s no more a right answer to that question than there is a right answer to “what shall I eat for dinner”.
Jane is disturbed by the idea of there being a right answer that she doesn’t know. She would not be happy to learn about “existence proofs”. This is a kind of proof in which the goal is not to find an answer. It’s just to show that there is an answer. This might seem pointless. But there are problems for which there can’t be an answer. If an answer’s been hard to find, it’s worth checking whether there are answers to find.
Pab Sungenis’s New Adventures of Queen Victoria for the 17th is maybe too marginal for full discussion. It’s just reeling off a physics-major joke. The comedy is from it being a pun: Planck’s Constant is a number important in many quantum mechanics problems. It’s named for Max Planck, one of the pioneers of the field. The constant is represented in symbols as either or as . The constant is equal to and might be used even more often. It turns out appears all over the place in quantum mechanics, so it’s convenient to write it with fewer symbols. is maybe properly called the reduced Planck’s constant, although in my physics classes I never encountered anyone calling it “reduced”. We just accepted there were these two Planck’s Constants and trusted context to make clear which one we wanted. It was . Planck’s Constant made some news among mensuration fans recently. The International Bureau of Weights and Measures chose to fix the value of this constant. This, through various physics truths, thus fixes the mass of the kilogram in terms of physical constants. This is regarded as better than the old method, where we just had a lump of metal that we used as reference.
Jonathan Lemon’s Rabbits Against Magic for the 17th is another probability joke. If a dropped piece of toast is equally likely to land butter-side-up or butter-side-down, then it’s quite unlikely to have it turn up the same way twenty times in a row. There’s about one chance in 524,288 of doing it in a string of twenty toast-flips. (That is, of twenty butter-side-up or butter-side-down in a row. If all you want is twenty butter-side-up, then there’s one chance in 1,048,576.) It’s understandable that Eight-Ball would take Lettuce to be quite lucky just now.
But there’s problems with the reasoning. First is the supposition that toast is as likely to fall butter-side-up as butter-side-down. I have a dim recollection of a mid-2000s pop physics book explaining why, given how tall a table usually is, a piece of toast is more likely to make half a turn — to land butter-side-down — before falling. Lettuce isn’t shown anywhere near a table, though. She might be dropping toast from a height that makes butter-side-up more likely. And there’s no reason to suppose that luck in toast-dropping connects to any formal game of chance. Or that her luck would continue to hold: even if she can drop the toast consistently twenty times there’s not much reason to think she could do it twenty-five times, or even twenty-one.
And then there’s this, a trivia that’s flawed but striking. Suppose that all seven billion people in the world have, at some point, tossed a coin at least twenty times. Then there should be seven thousand of them who had the coin turn up tails every single one of the first twenty times they’ve tossed a coin. And, yes, not everyone in the world has touched a coin, much less tossed it twenty times. But there could reasonably be quite a few people who grew up just thinking that every time you toss a coin it comes up tails. That doesn’t mean they’re going to have any luck gambling.
That there were twelve comic strips making my cut as mention-worthy this week should have let me do three essays of four comics each. But the desire to include all the comics from the same day in one essay leaves me one short here. So be it. Three of the four cartoonists featured here have a name of Sansom or Samson, so, that’s an edition title for you. No, Sam and Silo do not appear here.
Art Sansom and Chip Sansom’s Born Loser for the 6th uses arithmetic as a test of deference. Will someone deny a true thing in order to demonstrate loyalty? Arithmetic is full of things that are inarguably true. If we take the ordinary meanings of one, plus, equals, and three, it can’t be that one plus one equals three. Most fields of human endeavor are vulnerable to personal taste, or can get lost in definitions and technicalities. Or the advance of knowledge: my love and I were talking last night how we remembered hearing, as kids, the trivia that panda bears were not really bears, but a kind of raccoon. (Genetic evidence has us now put giant pandas with the bears, and red pandas as part of the same superfamily as raccoons, but barely.) Or even be subject to sarcasm. Arithmetic has a harder time of that. Mathematical ideas do evolve in time, certainly. But basic arithmetic is pretty stable. Logic is also a reliable source of things we can be confident are true. But arithmetic is more familiar than most logical propositions.
Samson’s Dark Side of the Horse for the 8th is the Roman Numerals joke for the week. It’s also a bit of a wordplay joke, although the music wordplay rather tha mathematics. Me, I still haven’t heard a clear reason why ‘MIC’ wouldn’t be a legitimate Roman numeral representation of 1099. I’m not sure whether ‘MIC’ would step on or augment the final joke, though.
Pab Sungenis’s New Adventures of Queen Victoria for the 8th has a comedia dell’arte-based structure for its joke. (The strip does that, now and then.) The comic uses a story problem, with the calculated answer rejected for the nonsense it would be. I suppose it must be possible for someone to eat eighty apples over a long enough time that it’s not distressing, and yet another twenty apples wouldn’t spoil. I wouldn’t try it, though.
or as 
. The constant 
and might be used even more often. It turns out ![Weenus: 'What's all the noise? I have work in the morning and I'm trying to sleep.' Eight-ball: 'Lettuce [rabbit] just dropped a slice of toast butter-side-up twenty times in a row!' Next panel, they're racing, dragging Lettuce to a flight to Las Vegas.](https://nebusresearch.files.wordpress.com/2019/07/rabbits-against-magic_jonathan-lemon_19-july-2019.gif)
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