## Reading the Comics, April 25, 2020: Off Brand Edition

Comic Strip Master Command decided I should have a week to catch up on things, and maybe force me to write something original. Of all the things I read there were only four strips that had some mathematics content. And three of them are such glancing mentions that I don’t feel it proper to include the strip. So let me take care of this.

Mark Anderson’s Andertoons for the 20th is the Mark Anderson’s Andertoons for the week. Wavehead apparently wants to know whether $\frac{3}{4}$ or $\frac{6}{8}$ is the better of these equivalent forms. I understand the impulse. Rarely in real life do we see two things that are truly equivalent; there’s usually some way in which one is better than the other. There may be two ways to get home for example, both taking about the same time to travel. One might have better scenery, though, or involve fewer difficult turns or less traffic this time of day. This is different, though: $\frac{3}{4}$ or $\frac{6}{8}$ are two ways to describe the same number. Which one is “better”?

The only answer is, better for what? What do you figure to do with this number afterwards? I admit, and suppose most people have, a preference for $\frac{3}{4}$. But that’s trained into us, in large part, by homework set to reduce fractions to “lowest terms”. There’s honest enough reasons behind that. It seems wasteful to have a factor in the numerator that’s immediately divided out by the denominator.

If this were 25 years ago, I could ask how many of you have written out a check for twenty-two and 3/4 dollars, then, rather than twenty-two and 75/100 dollars? The example is dated but the reason to prefer an equivalent form is not. If I know that I need the number represented by $\frac{3}{4}$, and will soon be multiplying it by eight, then $\frac{6}{8}$ may save me the trouble of thinking what three times two is. Or if I’ll be adding it to $\frac{5}{8}$, or something like that. If I’m measuring this for a recipe I need to cut in three, because the original will make three dozen cookies and I could certainly eat three dozen cookies, then $\frac{3}{4}$ may be more convenient than $\frac{6}{8}$. What is the better depends on what will clarify the thing I want to do.

A significant running thread throughout all mathematics, not just arithmetic, is finding equivalent forms. Ways to write the same concept, but in a way that makes some other work easier. Or more likely to be done correctly. Or, if the equivalent form is more attractive, more likely to be learned or communicated. It’s of value.

Jan Eliot’s Stone Soup Classics rerun for the 20th is a joke about how one can calculate what one is interested in. In this case, going from the number of days left in school to the number of hours and minutes and even seconds left. Personally, I have never had trouble remembering there are 24 hours in the day, nor that there are 86,400 seconds in the day. That there are 1,440 minutes in the day refuses to stick in my mind. Your experiences may vary.

Thaves’s Frank and Ernest for the 22nd is the Roman Numerals joke for the week, shifting the number ten to the representation “X” to the prefix “ex”.

Harry Bliss’s Bliss for the 23rd speaks of “a truck driver with a PhD in mathematical logic”. It’s an example of signifying intelligence through mathematics credentials. (It’s also a bit classicist, treating an intelligent truck driver as an unlikely thing.)

I’m caught up! This coming Sunday I hope to start discussingthis week’s comics in a post at this link. And for this week? I don’t know; maybe I’ll figure something to write. We’ll see. Thanks for reading.

## Reading the Comics, January 13, 2020: The State Pinball Championships Were Yesterday Edition

I am not my state’s pinball champion, although for the first time I did make it through the first round of play. What is important about this is that between that and a work trip I needed time for things which were not mathematics this past week. So my first piece this week will be a partial listing of comic strips that, last week, mentioned mathematics but not in a way I could build an essay around. … It’s not going to be a week with long essays, either, though. Here’s a start, though.

Henry Scarpelli’s Archie rerun for the 12th of January was about Moose’s sudden understanding of algebra, and wish for it to be handy. Well, every mathematician knows the moment when suddenly something makes sense, maybe even feels inevitably true. And then we do go looking for excuses to show it off.

Art Sansom and Chip Sansom’s The Born Loser for the 12th has the Loser helping his kid with mathematics homework. And the kid asking about when they’ll use it outside school.

Jason Chatfield’s Ginger Meggs for the 13th has Meggs fail a probability quiz, an outcome his teacher claims is almost impossible. If the test were multiple-choice (including true-or-false) it is possible to calculate the probability of a person making wild guesses getting every answer wrong (or right) and it usually is quite the feat, at least if the test is of appreciable length. For more open answers it’s harder to say what the chance of someone getting the question right, or wrong, is. And then there’s the strange middle world of partial credit.

My love does give multiple-choice quizzes occasionally and it is always a source of wonder when a student does worse than blind chance would. Everyone who teaches has seen that, though.

Jan Eliot’s Stone Soup Classics for the 13th just mentions the existence of mathematics homework, as part of the morning rush of events.

Ed Allison’s Unstrange Phenomenon for the 13th plays with optical illusions, which include several based on geometric tricks. Humans have some abilities at estimating relative areas and distances and lengths. But they’re not, like, smart abilities. They can be fooled, basically because their settings are circumstances where there’s no evolutionary penalty for being fooled this way. So we can go on letting the presence of arrow pointers mislead us about the precise lengths of lines, and that’s all right. There are, like, eight billion cognitive tricks going on all around us and most of them are much more disturbing.

That’s a fair start for the week. I hope to have a second part to this Tuesday. Thanks for reading.

## Reading the Comics, July 27, 2019: July 27, 2019 Edition

Last week was busy enough in mathematically themed comic strips. Some of these are pretty slight topics. But including them lets me do one of my favorite things, to have an essay that’s all comics from a single day. It’s my blog, I can use it to amuse myself.

Marcus Hamilton and Ron Ferdinand’s Dennis the Menace for the 27th shows the kind of slightness I’m dealing with. ‘Statistic’ has some nasty connotations in this sense. It suggests something dehumanizing has happened. But the word was maybe doomed to that. The word came about in the 18th century, to describe the systematic collection and study of information about whole populations. They started out being the gathering of information about the state.

But gathering information about a whole state implies, first, that the thing one finds interesting about a people are some measured and recorded aspect. Not the whole of their person-hood. Second, it implies that you wish to approximate the diversity of a whole people with some smaller set of numbers. There’s compelling reasons for a state to want to have statistics. They make it more plausible to know what the state can do. They make it plausible to forecast the results of a policy. Ideally, this encourages wisdom in policy-making. If the tools are used well.

Jan Eliot’s Stone Soup Classics for the 27th is the slightest of the comic strips I’m featuring this week. Really it should have been just a mention, but I wanted to have at least three comics shown for today’s essay. Making and counting change is constantly held up as the supreme purpose of teaching arithmetic. This though most any shop has a cash register that will calculate change faster and more accurately than even someone skilled in arithmetic will. I understand the crankiness of people who give the cashier $15.13 for their$12.38 bill, and get the thirteen cents handed back to them before it’s rung up. It’s not evidence that civilization is collapsing. It’s loose change.

Paul Trap’s Thatababy for the 27th continues the strip’s thread of turning geometry figures into jokes. This one is less useful than the comic featured Tuesday, which might help one remember what a scalene triangle or a rhombus looks like. Still might be fun.

And with that, last week’s mathematically-themed comic strips are fully discussed. This week’s comics will get discussion at an essay linked from here. Please visit soon and we’ll see what I have to say, and about what.