## Reading the Comics, July 15, 2017: Dawn Of Mathematics Jokes

So I try to keep up with nearly all the comic strips run on Comics Kingdom and on GoComics. This includes some vintage strips: take some ancient comic like Peanuts or Luann and rerun it, day at a time, from the beginning. This is always enlightening. It’s always interesting to see a comic in that first flush of creative energy, before the characters have quite settled in and before the cartoonist has found stock jokes that work so well they don’t even have to be jokes anymore. One of the most startling cases for me has been Johnny Hart’s B.C. which, in its Back To B.C. incarnation, has been pretty well knocking it out of the park.

Not this week, I’m sad to admit. This week it’s been doing a bunch of mathematics jokes, which is what gives me my permission to talk about it here. The jokes have been, eh, the usual, given the setup. A bit fresher, I suppose, for the characters in the strip having had fewer of their edges worn down by time. Probably there’ll be at least one that gets a bit of a grin.

Back To B.C. for the 11th sets the theme going. On the 12th it gets into word problems. And then for the 13th of July it turns violent and for my money funny.

Mark Tatulli’s Heart of the City has a number appear on the 12th. That’s been about as much mathematical content as Heart’s experience at Math Camp has taken. The story’s been more about Dana, her camp friend, who’s presented as good enough at mathematics to be bored with it, and the attempt to sneak out to the nearby amusement park. What has me distracted is wondering what amusement park this could be, given that Heart’s from Philadelphia and the camp’s within bus-trip range and in the forest. I can’t rule out that it might be Knoebels Amusement Park, in Elysburg, Pennsylvania, in which case Heart and Dana are absolutely right to sneak out of camp because it is this amazing place.

Mort Walker’s Beetle Bailey Vintage for the 21st of December, 1960 and rerun the 14th of July, 2017. Wow, I remember when they’d put recipes like this on the not-actual-news segment of the 5:00 news or so, and how much it irritated me that there wasn’t any practical way to write down the whole thing and even writing down the address to mail in for the recipe seemed like too much, what with how long it took on average to find a sheet of paper and a writing tool. In hindsight, I don’t know why this was so hard for me.

Mort Walker’s Beetle Bailey Vintage for the 21st of December, 1960 was rerun the 14th. I can rope this into mathematics. It’s about Cookie trying to scale up a recipe to fit Camp Swampy’s needs. Increasing the ingredient count is easy, or at least it is if your units scale nicely. I wouldn’t want to multiple a third of a teaspoon by 200 without a good stretching beforehand and maybe a rubdown afterwards. But the time needed to cook a multiplied recipe, that gets mysterious. As I understand it — the chemistry of cooking is largely a mystery to me — the center of the trouble is that to cook a thing, heat has to reach throughout the interior. But heat can only really be applied from the surfaces of the cooked thing. (Yes, theoretically, a microwave oven could bake through the entire volume of something. But this would require someone inventing a way to bake using a microwave.) So we must balance the heat that can be applied over what surface to the interior volume and any reasonable time to cook the thing. Won’t deny that at some point it seems easier to just make a smaller meal.

Zach Weinersmith’s Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal for the 14th goes to the old “inference testing” well again. This comes up from testing whether something strange is going on. Measure something in a sample. Is the result appreciably different from what would be a plausible result if nothing interesting is going on? The null hypothesis is the supposition that there isn’t anything interesting going on: the measurement’s in the range of what you’d expect given that the world is big and complicated. I’m not sure what the physicist’s exact experiment would have been. I suppose it would be something like “you lose about as much heat through your head as you do any region of skin of about the same surface area”. So, yeah, freezing would be expected, considering.

Percy Crosby’s Skippy for the 17th of May, 1930, and rerun the 15th, maybe doesn’t belong here. It’s just about counting. Never mind. I smiled at it, and I’m a fan of the strip. Give it a try; it’s that rare pre-Peanuts comic that still feels modern.

And, before I forget: Have any mathematics words or terms you’d like to have explained? I’m doing a Summer 2017 A To Z and taking requests! Please offer them over there, for convenience. I mean mine.

## Reading the Comics, June 10, 2017: Some Vintage Comics Edition

It’s too many comics to call this a famine edition, after last week’s feast. But there’s not a lot of theme to last week’s mathematically-themed comic strips. There’s a couple that include vintage comic strips from before 1940, though, so let’s run with that as a title.

Glenn McCoy and Gary McCoy’s The Flying McCoys for the 4th of June is your traditional blackboard full of symbols to indicate serious and deep thought on a subject. It’s a silly subject, but that’s fine. The symbols look to me gibberish, but clown research will go along non-traditional paths, I suppose.

Bill Hinds’s Tank McNamara for the 4th is built on mathematics’ successful invasion and colonization of sports management. Analytics, sabermetrics, Moneyball, whatever you want to call it, is built on ideas not far removed from the quality control techniques that changed corporate management so. Look for patterns; look for correlations; look for the things that seem to predict other things. It seems bizarre, almost inhuman, that we might be able to think of football players as being all of a kind, that what we know about (say) one running back will tell us something about another. But if we put roughly similarly capable people through roughly similar training and set them to work in roughly similar conditions, then we start to see why they might perform similarly. Models can help us make better, more rational, choices.

Morrie Turner’s Wee Pals rerun for the 4th is another word-problem resistance joke. I suppose it’s also a reminder about the unspoken assumptions in a problem. It also points out why mathematicians end up speaking in an annoyingly precise manner. It’s an attempt to avoid being shown up like Oliver is.

Which wouldn’t help with Percy Crosby’s Skippy for the 7th of April, 1930, and rerun the 5th. Skippy’s got a smooth line of patter to get out of his mother’s tutoring. You can see where Percy Crosby has the weird trait of drawing comics in 1930 that would make sense today still; few pre-World-War-II comics do.

Niklas Eriksson’s Carpe Diem for the 7th of June, 2017. If I may intrude in someone else’s work, it seems to me that the problem-solver might find a hint to what ‘x’ is by looking to the upper right corner of the page and the $x = \sqrt{13}$ already there.

Niklas Eriksson’s Carpe Diem for the 7th is a joke about mathematics anxiety. I don’t know that it actually explains anything, but, eh. I’m not sure there is a rational explanation for mathematics anxiety; if there were, I suppose it wouldn’t be anxiety.

George Herriman’s Krazy Kat for the 15th of July, 1939, and rerun the 8th, extends that odd little faintly word-problem-setup of the strips I mentioned the other day. I suppose identifying when two things moving at different speeds will intersect will always sound vaguely like a story problem.

George Herriman’s Krazy Kat for the 15th of July, 1939, as rerun the 8th of June, 2017. I know the comic isn’t to everyone’s taste, but I like it. I’m also surprised to see something as directly cartoonish as the brick stopping in midair like that in the third panel. The comic is usually surreal, yes, but not that way.

Tom Toles’s Randolph Itch, 2 am rerun for the 9th is about the sometimes-considered third possibility from a fair coin toss, and how to rig the results of that.

• #### goldenoj 9:01 pm on Sunday, 11 June, 2017 Permalink | Reply

Skippy is fascinating. Had to check if it was really from the 30s http://www.gocomics.com/skippy/2017/06/06 might also be a math comic.

You might want to put your Twitter handle in the sidebar – didn’t realize I had already seen you there via the blog-bot.

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• #### Joseph Nebus 11:57 pm on Monday, 12 June, 2017 Permalink | Reply

I didn’t realize I didn’t have my Twitter handle in the sidebar. Thanks, though, I’m glad to do stuff that makes me easier to find or understand, especially if it doesn’t require ongoing work.

Skippy, now, that’s not just a 1930s comic but one of the defining (American) comic strips. Basically every comic strip that stars kids who think is imitating it, either directly or through its influences, particularly Charles Schulz and Peanuts. It’s uncanny, especially when you compare it to its contemporaries, how nearly seamlessly it would fit into a modern comics page. It’s rather like Robert Benchley or Frank Fay in that way; now-obscure humorists or performers whose work is so modern and so influential that a wide swath of the modern genre is quietly imitating them.

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• #### Joseph Nebus 11:58 pm on Monday, 12 June, 2017 Permalink | Reply

Oh yes, and you’re right; I could’ve fit the comic from the 6th of June into a Reading the Comics post if I’d thought a bit more about it. Good eye!

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