Fish, Re-Counted

We had a bit of a surprise with our goldfish. Longtime readers might remember my string of essays describing how one might count fish by something other than the process of actually counting them all. In preparing our pond, which isn’t deep enough to be safe against a harsh winter, last October we set out trap and caught, we believed, all of them. There turned out to be 53 of them when I posted an update.

Stock photograph of our goldfish in a stock tank for the winter. Previous winter.

A couple of weeks after that — on Thanksgiving, it happens — we caught one more fish. This brought the total to 54. And I either failed to make note of it or I can’t find the note I made of it. Such happens.

In getting the pond ready for the spring, and the return of our goldfish to the outdoors, we found another one! It was just this orange thing dug into the muck of the pool, and we thought initially it was something that had fallen in and gotten lost. A heron scarer, was my love’s first guess. The pond thermometer that sank without trace some years back was mine. I used the grabber to poke at it and woke up a pretty sulky goldfish. It went over to some algae where we couldn’t so easily bother it.

So that brings our fish count to 55, for those keeping track. Fortunately, it was a very gentle winter in our parts. We’re hoping to bring the goldfish back out to the pond in the next week or two. Our best estimate for the carrying capacity of the pond is 65 to 130 goldfish, so, we will see whether the goldfish do anything about this slight underpopulation.

Reading the Comics, June 1, 2013

I’ve got a fresh batch of comics strips with mathematical themes. Actually, something I realized only as I was putting the list of them together, they’re word problem themes: there’s not any anthropomorphized numerals or puns on Wilhelm Leibniz’s name or anything like that. I can conjure easily reasons why word problems are good starting points for comic strip writers: they’re familiar to the reader, they don’t require any careful integration into character or storyline, and they can be designed to set up any punch line the cartoonist has in mind. Jason Chatfield’s Ginger Meggs and Gary Brookins’ and Susie MacNelly’s Shoe have running jokes in which Ginger or Skyler are asked for the collective name for a group of things, and some appropriately pun-like construct is given, and this is accepted though I don’t know why anyone would suppose there to be a collective name for a group of grocery store clerks or DSL technicians or whatnot.

Mason Mastroianni’s B.C. (May 23) sets things off with the classic form of a high school algebra word problem. I have wondered how long train-leaving-the-station problems are going to linger as example algebra problems, given that people (in the United States) really don’t take the trains for long distances if they can help it. The service is there; I just don’t believe it’s part of the common experience of students, which makes it a bit baffling as a word problem source. But the problems can be rewritten easily as airplane travel or cars on highways, if you want to salvage the question. (I’d also like to mention I generally like how Mastroianni has revitalized B.C. since Johnny Hart’s death. Particularly, the strip’s doing more of the comic anachronism that built the strip up in the first place, and this particular example contains a demonstration of that.)