Reading the Comics, October 26, 2018: I Am Overloaded Edition

I’ve settled to a pace of about four comics each essay. It makes for several Reading the Comics posts each week. But none of them are monsters that eat up whole evenings to prepare. Except that last week there were enough comics which made my initial cut that I either have to write a huge essay or I have to let last week’s strips spill over to Sunday. I choose that option. It’s the only way to square it with the demands of the A to Z posts, which keep creeping above a thousand words each however much I swear that this next topic is a nice quick one.

Roy Schneider’s The Humble Stumble for the 25th has some mathematics in a supporting part. It’s used to set up how strange Tommy is. Mathematics makes a good shorthand for this. It’s usually compact to write, important for word balloons. And it’s usually about things people find esoteric if not hilariously irrelevant to life. Tommy’s equation is an accurate description of what centripetal force would be needed to keep the Moon in a circular orbit at about the distance it really is. I’m not sure how to take Tommy’s doubts. If he’s just unclear about why this should be so, all right. Part of good mathematical learning can be working out the logic of some claim. If he’s not sure that Newtonian mechanics is correct — well, fair enough to wonder how we know it’s right. Spoiler: it is right. (For the problem of the Moon orbiting the Earth it’s right, at least to any reasonable precision.)

Roy Schneider’s The Humble Stumble rerun for the 25th of October, 2018. It originally ran the 30th of January, 2007.

Stephan Pastis’s Pearls Before Swine for the 25th shows how we can use statistics to improve our lives. At least, it shows how tracking different things can let us find correlations. These correlations might give us information about how to do things better. It’s usually a shaky plan to act on a correlation before you have a working hypothesis about why the correlation should hold. But it can give you leads to pursue.

Stephan Pastis’s Pearls Before Swine for the 25th of October, 2018. And from this we learn that Pig is not yet of the age where sometimes your neck and back hurt for three weeks because your pillow was a quarter-inch off its normal position. Bodies are fun things and everyone should have one.

Shaenon K Garrity and Jeffrey C Wells’s Skin Horse for the 25th is a joke about mathematics being hard. In this case even for a being that’s a natural mathematician. Relatable.

Shaenon K Garrity and Jeffrey C Wells’s Skin Horse for the 25th of October, 2018. Uh, the characters here are trapped inside an artificial intelligence and Virginia (the black-haired woman with clear glasses) has worked out the other characters are part of an intelligent swarm of bees and they’re trying to launch an escape, so this is why all the plot makes sense.

Eric the Circle for the 26th, this one by Vissoro, is a “two types of people in the world” joke. Given the artwork I believe it’s also riffing on the binary-arithmetic version of the joke. Which is, “there are 10 types of people in the world, those who understand binary and those who don’t”.

Eric the Circle for the 26th of October, 2018, this one by Vissoro. It makes me think of that Futurama scene where Bender has a nightmare, dreaming of a 2.

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If you’d like to see more Reading the Comics posts, try this link. Essays mentioning The Humble Stumble are at this link. Essays discussing by Pearls Before Swine are at this link. Essays with a mention of Skin Horse should be at this link. I’m surprised to learn there are others, too. I’d have thought it was a new tag. Posts about what’s brought up by Eric the Circle should be at link. And this month and the rest of this year my Fall 2018 Mathematics A-To-Z should continue. And it is open for requests for more of the alphabet.

Reading the Comics, April 15, 2017: Extended Week Edition

It turns out last Saturday only had the one comic strip that was even remotely on point for me. And it wasn’t very on point either, but since it’s one of the Creators.com strips I’ve got the strip to show. That’s enough for me.

Henry Scarpelli and Craig Boldman’s Archie for the 8th is just about how algebra hurts. Some days I agree.

Henry Scarpelli and Craig Boldman’s Archie for the 8th of April, 2017. Do you suppose Archie knew that Dilton was listening there, or was he just emoting his fatigue to himself?

Ruben Bolling’s Super-Fun-Pak Comix for the 8th is an installation of They Came From The Third Dimension. “Dimension” is one of those oft-used words that’s come loose of any technical definition. We use it in mathematics all the time, at least once we get into Introduction to Linear Algebra. That’s the course that talks about how blocks of space can be stretched and squashed and twisted into each other. You’d expect this to be a warmup act to geometry, and I guess it’s relevant. But where it really pays off is in studying differential equations and how systems of stuff changes over time. When you get introduced to dimensions in linear algebra they describe degrees of freedom, or how much information you need about a problem to pin down exactly one solution.

It does give mathematicians cause to talk about “dimensions of space”, though, and these are intuitively at least like the two- and three-dimensional spaces that, you know, stuff moves in. That there could be more dimensions of space, ordinarily inaccessible, is an old enough idea we don’t really notice it. Perhaps it’s hidden somewhere too.

Amanda El-Dweek’s Amanda the Great of the 9th started a story with the adult Becky needing to take a mathematics qualification exam. It seems to be prerequisite to enrolling in some new classes. It’s a typical set of mathematics anxiety jokes in the service of a story comic. One might tsk Becky for going through university without ever having a proper mathematics class, but then, I got through university without ever taking a philosophy class that really challenged me. Not that I didn’t take the classes seriously, but that I took stuff like Intro to Logic that I was already conversant in. We all cut corners. It’s a shame not to use chances like that, but there’s always so much to do.

Mark Anderson’s Andertoons for the 10th relieves the worry that Mark Anderson’s Andertoons might not have got in an appearance this week. It’s your common kid at the chalkboard sort of problem, this one a kid with no idea where to put the decimal. As always happens I’m sympathetic. The rules about where to move decimals in this kind of multiplication come out really weird if the last digit, or worse, digits in the product are zeroes.

Mel Henze’s Gentle Creatures is in reruns. The strip from the 10th is part of a story I’m so sure I’ve featured here before that I’m not even going to look up when it aired. But it uses your standard story problem to stand in for science-fiction gadget mathematics calculation.

Dave Blazek’s Loose Parts for the 12th is the natural extension of sleep numbers. Yes, I’m relieved to see Dave Blazek’s Loose Parts around here again too. Feels weird when it’s not.

Bill Watterson’s Calvin and Hobbes rerun for the 13th is a resisting-the-story-problem joke. But Calvin resists so very well.

John Deering’s Strange Brew for the 13th is a “math club” joke featuring horses. Oh, it’s a big silly one, but who doesn’t like those too?

Dan Thompson’s Brevity for the 14th is one of the small set of punning jokes you can make using mathematician names. Good for the wall of a mathematics teacher’s classroom.

Shaenon K Garrity and Jefferey C Wells’s Skin Horse for the 14th is set inside a virtual reality game. (This is why there’s talk about duplicating objects.) Within the game, the characters are playing that game where you start with a set number (in this case 20) tokens and take turn removing a couple of them. The “rigged” part of it is that the house can, by perfect play, force a win every time. It’s a bit of game theory that creeps into recreational mathematics books and that I imagine is imprinted in the minds of people who grow up to design games.