Reading the Comics, October 21, 2017: Education Week Edition

Comic Strip Master Command had a slow week for everyone. This is odd since I’d expect six to eight weeks ago, when the comics were (probably) on deadline, most (United States) school districts were just getting back to work. So education-related mathematics topics should’ve seemed fresh. I think I can make that fit. No way can I split this pile of comics over two days.

Hector D Cantu and Carlos Castellanos’s Baldo for the 17th has Gracie quizzed about percentages of small prices, apparently as a test of her arithmetic. Her aunt has other ideas in mind. It’s hard to dispute that this is mathematics people use in real life. The commenters on GoComics got into an argument about whether Gracie gave the right answers, though. That is, not that 20 percent of $5.95 is anything about $1.19. But did Tia Carmen want to know what 20 percent of $5.95, or did she want to know what $5.95 minus 20 percent of that price was? Should Gracie have answered $4.76 instead? It took me a bit to understand what the ambiguity was, but now that I see it, I’m glad I didn’t write a multiple-choice test with both $1.19 and $4.76 as answers. I’m not sure how to word the questions to avoid ambiguity yet still sound like something one of the hew-mons might say.

Dan Thompson’s Brevity for the 19th uses the blackboard and symbols on it as how a mathematician would prove something. In this case, love. Arithmetic’s a good visual way of communicating the mathematician at work here. I don’t think a mathematician would try arguing this in arithmetic, though. I mean if we take the premise at face value. I’d expect an argument in statistics, so, a mathematician showing various measures of … feelings or something. And tests to see whether it’s plausible this cluster of readings could come out by some reason other than love. If that weren’t used, I’d expect an argument in propositional logic. And that would have long strings of symbols at work, but they wouldn’t look like arithmetic. They look more like Ancient High Martian. Just saying.

Reza Farazmand’s Poorly Drawn Lines for the 20th you maybe already saw going around your social media. It’s well-designed for that. Also for grad students’ office doors.

Dave Coverly’s Speed Bump for the 20th is designed with crossover appeal in mind and I wonder if whoever does Reading the Comics for English Teacher Jokes is running this same strip in their collection for the week.

Darrin Bell’s Candorville for the 21st sees Lemont worry that he’s forgotten how to do long division. And, fair enough: any skill you don’t use in long enough becomes stale, whether it’s division or not. You have to keep in practice and, in time, have to decide what you want to keep in practice about. (That said, I have a minor phobia about forgetting how to prove the Contraction Mapping Theorem, as several professors in grad school stressed how it must always be possible to give a coherent proof of that, even if you’re startled awake in the middle of the night by your professor.) Me, I would begin by estimating what 4,858.8 divided by 297.492 should be. 297.492 is very near 300. And 4,858.8 is a little over 4800. And that’s suggestive because it’s obvious that 48 divided by 3 is 16. Well, it’s obvious to me. So I would expect the answer to be “a little more than 16” and, indeed, it’s about 16.3.

(Don’t read the comments on GoComics. There’s some slide-rule-snobbishness, and some snark about the uselessness of the skill or the dumbness of Facebook readers, and one comment about too many people knowing how to multiply by someone who’s reading bad population-bomb science fiction of the 70s.)

Reading the Comics, October 7, 2017: Rerun Comics Edition

The most interesting mathematically-themed comic strips from last week were also reruns. So be it; at least I have an excuse to show a 1931-vintage comic. Also, after discovering my old theme didn’t show the category of essay I was posting, I did literally minutes of search for a new theme that did. And that showed tags. And that didn’t put a weird color behind LaTeX inline equations. So I’m using the same theme as my humor blog does, albeit with a different typeface, and we’ll hope that means I don’t post stuff to the wrong blog. As it is I start posting something to the wrong place about once every twenty times. All I want is a WordPress theme with all the good traits of the themes I look at and none of the drawbacks; why is that so hard to get?

Elzie Segar’s Thimble Theatre rerun for the 25th of April, 1931, and rerun the 5th of October, 2017. No, Kabibble Kabaret is not actually a joke and yes, it’s always like that, and no, I have no idea why Comics Kingdom includes these footers. I find them fascinating in their badness, but, yeah.

Elzie Segar’s Thimble Theatre rerun for the 5th originally ran the 25th of April, 1931. It’s just a joke about Popeye not being good at bookkeeping. In the story, Popeye’s taking the $50,000 reward from his last adventure and opened a One-Way Bank, giving people whatever money they say they need. And now you understand how the first panel of the last row has several jokes in it. The strip is partly a joke about Popeye being better with stuff he can hit than anything else, of course. I wonder if there’s an old stereotype of sailors being bad at arithmetic. I remember reading about pirate crews that, for example, not-as-canny-as-they-think sailors would demand a fortieth or a fiftieth of the prizes as their pay, instead of a mere thirtieth. But it’s so hard to tell what really happened and what’s just a story about the stupidity of people. Marginal? Maybe, but I’m a Popeye fan and this is my blog, so there.

Bill Rechin’s Crock rerun(?) from the 6th must have come before. I don’t know when. Anyway it’s a joke about mathematics being way above everybody’s head.

Bill Rechin’s Crock from the 6th of October, 2017. Yeah, I don’t exactly get the vulture as a pack animal either, but it’s kind of a cute idea. Or I’m a soft touch for cartoon and comic strip vultures. I would like to identify the characters but I forget their names and Wikipedia and the official Comics Kingdom site don’t give me any help.

Norm Feuti’s Gil rerun for the 6th is a subverted word problem joke. And it’s a reminder of how hard story problems can be. You need something that has a mathematics question on point. And the question has to be framed as asking something someone would actually care to learn. Plus the story has to make sense. Much easier when you’re teaching calculus, I think.

Jason Chatfield’s Ginger Meggs for the 6th is a playing-stupid joke built in percentages. Cute enough for the time it takes to read.

Gary Wise and Lance Aldrich’s Real Life Adventures for the 6th is a parent-can’t-help-with-homework joke, done with arithmetic since it’s hard to figure another subject that would make the joke possible. I suppose a spelling assignment could be made to work. But that would be hard to write so it didn’t seem contrived.

Thaves’ Frank and Ernest for the 7th feels like it’s a riff on the old saw about Plato’s Academy. (The young royal sent home with a coin because he asked what the use of this instruction was, and since he must get something from everything, here’s his drachma.) Maybe. Or it’s just the joke that you make if you have “division” and “royals” in mind.

Mark Tatulli’s Lio for the 7th is not quite the anthropomorphic symbols joke for this past week. It’s circling that territory, though.

Reading the Comics, December 17, 2016: Sleepy Week Edition

Comic Strip Master Command sent me a slow week in mathematical comics. I suppose they knew I was on somehow a busier schedule than usual and couldn’t spend all the time I wanted just writing. I appreciate that but don’t want to see another of those weeks when nothing qualifies. Just a warning there.

John Rose’s Barney Google and Snuffy Smith for the 12th of December, 2016. I appreciate the desire to pay attention to continuity that makes Rose draw in the coffee cup both panels, but Snuffy Smith has to swap it from one hand to the other to keep it in view there. Not implausible, just kind of busy. Also I can’t fault Jughaid for looking at two pages full of unillustrated text and feeling lost. That’s some Bourbaki-grade geometry going on there.

John Rose’s Barney Google and Snuffy Smith for the 12th is a bit of mathematical wordplay. It does use geometry as the “hard mathematics we don’t know how to do”. That’s a change from the usual algebra. And that’s odd considering the joke depends on an idiom that is actually used by real people.

Patrick Roberts’s Todd the Dinosaur for the 12th uses mathematics as the classic impossibly hard subject a seven-year-old can’t be expected to understand. The worry about fractions seems age-appropriate. I don’t know whether it’s fashionable to give elementary school students experience thinking of ‘x’ and ‘y’ as numbers. I remember that as a time when we’d get a square or circle and try to figure what number fits in the gap. It wasn’t a 0 or a square often enough.

Patrick Roberts’s Todd the Dinosaur for the 12th of December, 2016. Granting that Todd’s a kid dinosaur and that T-Rexes are not renowned for the hugeness of their arms, wouldn’t that still be enough space for a lot of text to fit around? I would have thought so anyway. I feel like I’m pluralizing ‘T-Rex’ wrong, but what would possibly be right? ‘Ts-rex’? Don’t make me try to spell tyrannosaurus.

Jef Mallett’s Frazz for the 12th uses one of those great questions I think every child has. And it uses it to question how we can learn things from statistical study. This is circling around the “Bayesian” interpretation of probability, of what odds mean. It’s a big idea and I’m not sure I’m competent to explain it. It amounts to asking what explanations would be plausibly consistent with observations. As we get more data we may be able to rule some cases in or out. It can be unsettling. It demands we accept right up front that we may be wrong. But it lets us find reasonably clean conclusions out of the confusing and muddy world of actual data.

Thanks, but a correction: 121.834%. https://t.co/cgnT7N90LR

— John Allen Paulos (@JohnAllenPaulos) December 14, 2016

Sam Hepburn’s Questionable Quotebook for the 14th illustrates an old observation about the hypnotic power of decimal points. I think Hepburn’s gone overboard in this, though: six digits past the decimal in this percentage is too many. It draws attention to the fakeness of the number. One, two, maybe three digits past the decimal would have a more authentic ring to them. I had thought the John Allen Paulos tweet above was about this comic, but it’s mere coincidence. Funny how that happens.

Reading the Comics, November 16, 2016: Seeing the Return of Jokes

Comic Strip Master Command sent out a big mass of comics this past week. Today’s installment will only cover about half of them. This half does feature a number of comics that show off jokes that’ve run here before. I’m sure it was coincidence. Comic Strip Master Command must have heard I was considering alerting cartoonists that I was talking about them. That’s fine for something like last week when I could talk about NP-complete problems or why we call something a “hypotenuse”. It can start a conversation. But “here’s a joke treating numerals as if they were beings”? All they can do is agree, that is what the joke is. If they disagree at that point they’re just trying to start a funny argument.

Scott Metzger’s The Bent Pinky for the 14th sees the return of anthropomorphic numerals humor. I’m a bit surprised Metzger goes so far as to make every numeral either a 3 or a 9. I’d have expected a couple of 2’s and 4’s. I understand not wanting to get into two-digit numbers. The premise of anthropomorphic numerals is troublesome if you need multiple-digit numbers.

Jon Rosenberg’s Goats for the 14th doesn’t directly mention a mathematical topic. But the story has the characters transported to a world with monkeys at typewriters. We know where that is. So we see that return after no time away, really.

Rick Detorie’s One Big Happy rerun for the 14th sees the return of “110 percent”. Happily the joke’s structured so that we can dodge arguing about whether it’s even possible to give 110 percent. I’m inclined to say of course it’s possible. “Giving 100 percent” in the context of playing a sport would mean giving the full reasonable effort. Or it does if we want to insist on idiomatic expressions making sense. It seems late to be insisting on that standard, but some people like it as an idea.

George Herriman’s Krazy Kat for the 22nd of December, 1938. Rerun the 15th of November, 2016. Really though who could sleep when they have a sweet adding machine like that to play with? Someone who noticed that that isn’t machine tape coming out the top, of course, but rather is the punch-cards for a band organ. Curiously low-dialect installment of the comic.

George Herriman’s Krazy Kat for the 22nd of December, 1938, was rerun on Tuesday. And it’s built on counting as a way of soothing the mind into restful sleep. Mathematics as a guide to sleep also appears, in minor form, in Darrin Bell’s Candorville for the 13th. I’m not sure why counting, or mental arithmetic, is able to soothe one into sleep. I suppose it’s just that it’s a task that’s engaging enough the semi-conscious mind can do it without having the emotional charge or complexity to wake someone up. I’ve taken to Collatz Conjecture problems, myself.

Terri Libenson’s Pajama Diaries for the 16th sees the return of Venn Diagram jokes. And it’s a properly-formed Venn Diagram, with the three circles coming together to indicate seven different conditions.

Terri Libenson’s Pajama Diaries for the 16th of November, 2016. I was never one for buying too much of the bakery aisle, myself, but then I also haven’t got teenagers. And I did go through so much of my life figuring there was no reason I shouldn’t eat another bagel again.

Gary Wise and Lance Aldrich’s Real Life Adventures for the 16th just name-drops rhomboids, using them as just a funny word. Geometry is filled with wonderful, funny-sounding words. I’m fond of “icosahedron” myself. But “rhomboid” and its related words are good ones. I think they hit that sweet spot between being uncommon in ordinary language without being so exotic that a reader’s eye trips over it. However funny a “triacontahedron” might be, no writer should expect the reader to forgive that pile of syllables. A rhomboid is a kind of parallelogram, so it’s got four sides. The sides come in two parallel pairs. Both members of a pair have the same length, but the different pairs don’t. They look like the kitchen tiles you’d get for a house you couldn’t really afford, not with tiling like that.

Reading the Comics, June 18, 2016: The Quiet Week Edition

It’s been a quiet week. There’s not a lot of comic strips telling mathematically-themed jokes. Those that were didn’t give me a lot to talk about. And then on Friday nobody came around to even look at my blog. I exaggerate but only barely; I was down to about a quarter the usual low point of page views. I have no explanation for this and I just hope it doesn’t come up again. That’s the sort of thing that’ll break a mere blogger’s heart.

Charles Brubaker’s Ask A Cat for the 12th got the week started with a numerals-as-things joke.

Mike Baldwin’s Cornered for the 12th uses the traditional blackboard — well, whiteboard — full of mathematics to represent intelligence. The symbols aren’t in enough detail to mean anything,

Jeremy Kaye’s Up and Out for the 13th uses a smaller blackboard (whiteboard) full of mathematics to represent intelligence. Here the symbols are more clearly focused, on Boring High School Algebra. It was looking like this might be the blackboard (well, whiteboard)-themed week.

Dan Piraro’s Bizarro for the 14th of June, 2016. Don’t be distracted by the little alien in the upper-right corner. It isn’t part of the joke. It’s just there in every panel. (Because Piraro loves drawing more stuff than he has to, and he works some number of recurring little figures into each panel. There’s also, often, a “K²” that refers to his daughter’s initials. There’s often also and a disembodied eyeball, a firecracker, a screaming rabbit, some pie, an upside-down bird, a crown, and other stuff. There’s also usually a digit near his signature that warns how many hidden symbols there are in the day’s panel so people know when to stop looking. In this case it’s ‘3’.)

Dan Piraro’s Bizarro for the 14th I admit I don’t quite get. I get that it’s circling around the invention of mathematics and of architecture and all that. And I expect the need to build stuff efficiently helped inspire people to do mathematics. I’m just not sure how the joke quite fits together here. It happens.

Bill Amend’s Fox Trot Classics for the 17th reruns a storyline in which Jason tries to de-nerdify himself. The use of many digits past the decimal make up a lot of what’s left of Jason’s nerdiness. And since it’s easy to overlook let me point this out: 0.0675 percent is only half of the difference between 99.865 percent and 100 percent. It’s not exactly a classic nerd move to use decimal points when a fraction would be at least as good. Digits have a hypnotic power; many people would think 0.25 a more mathematical thing than “one-quarter”. But it is quite nerdly to speak of 0.0675 percent instead of “half of what’s left”.

This strip originally ran the 24th of June, 2005.