Reading the Comics, August 30, 2019: The Ones Not Worth Mentioning Edition

Each week Comic Strip Master Command sends out some comics that mention mathematics, but that aren’t substantial enough to write miniature essays about. This past week, too. Here are the comics that just mention mathematics. You may like them; there’s just not more to explain is all.

Thaves’s Frank and Ernest for the 25th is a bunch of cafeteria lunch jokes. Geometry and wordplay about three square meals a day comes up.

Jeffrey Caulfield and Brian Ponshock’s Yaffle for the 26th has a bunch of jokes about representing two, as part of a “tattwo parlor”. I’m not sure how to categorize this. Wordplay, I suppose.

Brian Anderson’s Dog Eat Doug for the 27th uses “quantum entanglement equations” to represent deep thought on a complicated subject. Calculations are usually good for this.

Dan Collins’s Looks Good On Paper rerun for the 27th uses a blackboard of mathematics — geometry-related formulas — to stand in for all classwork. This strip also ran in 2017 and in 2015. I haven’t checked 2013. I know the strip is still in original production, as it’ll include strips referring to current events, so I’ll keep reading it a while yet.

Rick Detorie’s One Big Happy for the 27th mentions the “Old Math”, but going against Comic Strip Law, not as part of a crack about the New Math. This is just a simple age joke.

Bill Schorr’s The Grizzwells for the 29th is a joke about rabbit arithmetic. You know, about how well rabbits multiply and all.

Ernie Bushmiller’s Nancy Classics for the 29th, which originally ran the 23rd of November, 1949, is a basic cheating-in-class joke. It works for mathematics in a way it wouldn’t for, say, history. Mathematics has enough symbols that don’t appear in ordinary writing that you could copy them upside-down without knowing that you transcribe something meaningless. Well, not realizing an upside-down 4 isn’t anything is a bit odd, but anyone can get pretty lost in symbols.

Gary Wise and Lance Aldrich’s Real Life Adventures for the 29th builds on the phrase “do the math” representing the process of thinking something out.

Percy Crosby’s Skippy for the 30th originally ran the 4th of May, 1932. It’s one of those jokes subverting the form of a story problem, one about rates of completion.

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This wraps up the past week’s mathematics comic strips. I should have the next Reading the Comics essay here Sunday. And starting tomorrow: the Fall 2019 Mathematics A To Z. The benefit of this sort of schedule is I have to publish whether I’m happy with the essay or not!

Reading the Comics, March 14, 2019: Pi Day 2019 Edition

Some weeks there’s an obvious theme. Most weeks there’s not. But mid-March has formed a traditional theme for at least one day. I’m going to excerpt that from the rest of the week’s comics, because I’ve noticed what readership around here is like for stuff tagged “Pi Day” in mid-March. You all can do what you like with your pop-mathematics blogs.

Pi Day seems to have brought out fewer comics than in years past. The ones that were made, among the set I read, were also less on point. There was a lot of actual physical pie involved, too, suggesting the day might be escaping the realm of pop-mathematics silliness straight into pun nobody thinks about. Or maybe cartoonists just didn’t have a fresh angle this year.

John Hambrock’s The Brilliant Mind of Edison Lee shows off a nerd kind of mistake. At least one I think of as particularly nerdy. Wanting to calculate is a natural urge, especially for those who do it well. But to calculate the circumference of a pie from its diameter? What is exciting about that? More, does Grandpa recognize what a circumference is? It’s relatively easy to see the diameter of a pie. Area, also. But circumference? I’m not sure people are good at estimating the circumference of things, not by sight. You’d need a tape measure, or a similar flexible ruler, to start with and we don’t see that. Without the chance to measure it himself, Grandpa has to take the circumference (and, for that matter, diameter) at Edison Lee’s word. What would convince Grandpa of anything?

John Hambrock’s The Brilliant Mind of Edison Lee for the 14th of March, 2019. This and other essays inspired by Edison Lee can be found at this link.

For example, even if Grandpa accepted that Edison Lee had multiplied one number by 3.14 and gotten another number he might ask: how do we know pi is the same for pies of all sizes? Could a small pie’s circumference be only three times the diameter’s length, while a large pie’s is four times that? Could Edison offer an answer for why 3.14, or some nearby number, is all that interesting?

Liz Climo’s Cartoons for the 14th of March, 2019. I haven’t had reason to discuss this comic here before. This and any future essays discussing Liz Climo Cartoons should appear at this new tag.

Liz Climo’s Cartoons is an example of the second kind of strip I mentioned during my introductory paragraphs. While it’s nominally built on Pi Day, any mathematics is gone. It’s just about the pun. And, well, the fun of having a capybara around.

Mark Parisi’s Off The Mark is the most on-topic strip for the day. And the anthropomorphic numerals joke for the day, too. It’s built on there being infinitely many digits to π, which, true enough. There are also infinitely many digits to , mind; they’re just not so interesting a set. π being irrational gives us a never-ending variety of digits. It’s almost certainly normal, too. Any finite string of digits most likely appears infinitely often in this string.

Mark Parisi’s Off The Mark for the 14th of March, 2019. The essays inspired by Off The Mark should appear at this link.

We won’t ever know enough digits of π to depict all of them. But we can depict the digits we know, and many different ways. Here’s a 2015 Washington Post article with several pictures representing the digits, including some neat “random walk” ones. In those the digits are used to represent directions and distances for a thing to move, and it represents the number as this curious wispy structure. There’s amazing pictures to be made of this.

John Zakour and Scott Roberts’s Working Daze for the 15th of March, 2019. And this comic appears often enough. Working Days strips should appear in discussions at this link.

John Zakour and Scott Roberts’s Working Daze for the 15th is built more around the pie pun. I was relieved to see this. The kind of nerd jokes routinely made in Working Daze made me think it was bizarre the comic strip didn’t do a Pi Day joke. They were saving the setup.

Bill Schorr’s The Grizzwells for the 13th of March, 2019. I’ve had a few chances to mention The Grizzwells and those essays are at this link.

And last, a comic strip that I don’t think was trying to set up a Pi Day joke. But Bill Schorr’s The Grizzwells for the 13th is a routine story problem joke. But that the setup mentions pies? If this ran on the 14th I would feel confident Schorr was going for a Pi Day comic. But it didn’t, so I don’t know if Schorr was going for that or not.

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And those are the surprisingly few Pi Day 2019 comic strips. Later this week I should post, at this link, other recent mathematically-themed comic strips. Thanks for reading.

Reading the Comics, September 29, 2018: Vintage Comics Edition

Four more comics from last week struck me as worth mentioning. Two of them are over sixty years old.

Incidentally, Walt Kelly’s Pogo first appeared in the newspaper seventy years ago today. I don’t know anyone rerunning the comics the way Skippy or Thimble Theatre (Popeye) or the like are, which is a shame. (Few if any strips would be on-point around here, but it’s still worth reading.) But I did think some of the folks around here would like to know.

Percy Crosby’s Skippy for the 25th is a vintage-1931 strip about the miseries of learning arithmetic. Skippy’s scheme to both improve by copying one another’s 50-percent-right papers is not necessarily a bad one. It depends on a couple things to work. For example, do they both get the same questions wrong? Possibly; it’d be natural for both students to do worse on the harder questions. But suppose that the questions Skippy and Sooky get wrong are independent of one another. That is, knowing that Skippy got a question right doesn’t affect our estimate of the probability whether Sooky got that question right. In that case, we’d expect both of them to get about 25% of the questions right. And at least one of them would get about 75% of the questions right. So, if they could copy the right answers, they could get a 25-point improvement. That’s pretty good.

Percy Crosby’s Skippy for the 25th of September, 2018. It originally ran, looks like, the 28th of May, 1931. Skippy’s the one talking; I’ve been calling the other kid Sooky, but am not confident I’m right the way I’m sure Charlie Brown is talking to Violet below.

Telling which are the right answers is hard. But, it’s typically easier to check whether an answer is right than it is to find an answer. Arithmetic is a point where this might not be usefully so. You can verify that 25 – 17 is indeed 8 by trying to calculate 17 + 8. But I don’t know that one equation is easier than the other.

Gene Weingarten, Dan Weingarten, and David Clark’s Barney and Clyde for the 26th of September, 2018. Not depicted: how long it takes students to understand the course grade is a weighted average.

Gene Weingarten, Dan Weingarten, and David Clark’s Barney and Clyde for the 26th is a percentages joke. Miss Latham is making the supposition that one hundred percent effort is needed to get the assignment done correctly. That’s fair if the full effort to make is “what effort it takes to do the assignment correctly”. Tautological, but indisputable. If the one-hundred-percent-effort is whatever’s considered the appropriate standard effort to make for an assignment this size … well, that’s harder to agree with. Some assignments, some days, are easy; some just aren’t. Depends on what’s being asked.

Bill Schorr’s The Grizzwells for the 27th says it’s about mathematics. The particular question is about how many quarts go into a gallon. Measurement questions like this do get bundled into mathematics. It’s a bit hard to say why, though. It’s arbitrary how big a unit is; all we really demand is that it be convenient for whatever we’re doing. It’s even more arbitrary what the subdivisions of a unit are. A quart — well, the name gives away, it should be a quarter of something bigger. But there’s no reason we couldn’t have divided a gallon into three pieces, or six, or twelve instead. We just didn’t happen to do that. And similarly for subdividing a quart (or whatever name it would get, if it were a sixth of a gallon).

Bill Schorr’s The Grizzwells for the 27th of September, 2018. The bear is named Gunther and the porcupine Pierpoint. I mention this mostly for my own benefit. I’ve had to look up their names a surprising amount and it’s always harder than it should be. Every comic strip site needs a page that offers an up-to-date cast roster, including pictures, names, and relationships to the other main characters.

I suppose it’s from thinking of arithmetic as a tool for clerks and shopkeepers. These calculations would need to carry along units. Even the currency might need to carry units. Decimal currency obscures the units. Older-style pound-shilling-pence units (or whatever they were called in the local language) don’t allow that. So I’m guessing that it was natural to think of, say, “quadruple three quarts” as the same sort of problem as “one-sixth of 8s/4d”.

Charles Schulz’s Peanuts Begins for the 29th of September, 2018. It originally ran the 29th of June, 1954.. Violet was one of the original cast, but she did pretty much disappear from the strip when it turned out Lucy and Peppermint Patty were way better characters. She last appeared in a 1992 strip that got rerun during Schulz’s little hiatus in late 1997 so good luck giving an un-challengeable statement of her last appearance in the pre-eternal-reruns comic strip run.

Charles Schulz’s Peanuts Begins for the 29th speaks of “a perfect circle”. Violet asks an excellent question. But to say “a perfect circle” does communicate something. We name things like circles and lines and squares and agree they have certain properties. Also that the circles or lines or squares that we see in the world don’t have those properties. We might emphasize that something is a perfect circle or a straight line or something, to insist that it approaches this ideal of circle-ness. I’m not well-versed in the philosophy of mathematics. But it does seem hard to avoid Platonist thoughts about it. It’s hard to do geometry without pictures. But we insist to ourselves that the pictures may lie to us.

My other Reading the Comics posts should appear at this link. Percy Crosby’s Skippy gets mentions in essays at this link. There’s not many of them, but I really like the strip, so I hope there’s chances for more soon. Essays discussing topics raised by Barney and Clyde are at this link. Essays which discuss The Grizzwells are at this link. And Peanuts — both the 1970s “current” runs syndicated to newspapers and the 1950s “vintage” rerun only online — are at this link. And please stick around; there’ll be another A to Z post in about a day unless things go wrong.

Reading the Comics, April 19, 2018: Late Because Of Pinball Edition

Hi, all. I apologize for being late in posting this, but my Friday and Saturday were eaten up by pinball competition. Pinball At The Zoo, particularly, in Kalamazoo, Michigan. There, Friday, I stepped up first thing and put in four games on the Classics, pre-1985, tournament bank and based on my entry scores was ranked the second-best player there. And then over the day my scores dwindled lower and lower on the list of what people had entered until, in the last five minutes of qualifying, they dropped off the roster altogether and I was knocked out. Meanwhile in the main tournament, I was never even close to making playoffs. But I did have a fantastic game of Bally/Midway’s World Cup Soccer, a game based on how much the United States went crazy for soccer that time we hosted the World Cup for some reason. The game was interrupted by one of the rubber straps around one of the kickers (the little triangular table just past the flippers that you would think would be called the bumpers) breaking, and then by the drain breaking in a way that later knocked the game entirely out of the competition. So anyway besides that glory I’ve been very busy trying to figure out what’s gone wrong and stepping outside to berate the fox squirrels out back, and that’s why I’m late with all this. I’m sure you relate.

Bill Holbrook’s Kevin and Kell rerun for the 15th of April, 2018. The strip is this enormously tall format because at the time it originally ran (in 2012) the strip appeared in print in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, sharing the page with Wiley Miller’s similarly-formatted Non Sequitur. The strip has since resumed more normal dimensions.

Bill Holbrook’s Kevin and Kell rerun for the 15th is the anthropomorphic numerals strip for the week. Also the first of the anthropomorphic strips for the week. Calculating taxes has always been one of the compelling social needs for mathematics, arithmetic especially. If we consider the topic to be “accounting” then that might be the biggest use of mathematics in society. At least by humans; I’m not sure how to rate the arithmetic that computers do even for not explicitly mathematical tasks like sending messages back and forth. New comic strip tag for around here, too.

Bill Schorr’s The Grizzwells for the 17th of April, 2018. Yeah, people say that, but then they get into Abstract Algebra and then they see any proof whatsoever that involves ideals of rings.

Bill Schorr’s The Grizzwells for the 17th sees Fauna not liking trigonometry class. I’m sympathetic. I remember it as seeming to be a lot of strange new definitions put to vague purposes. On the bright side, when you get into calculus trigonometry starts solving more problems than it creates. On the dim side, at least when I took it they tried to pass off “trigonometric substitution” as a thing we might need. (OK, it’s come in useful sometimes, but not as often as the presentation made it look.) Also a new comic strip tag.

Eric the Circle for the 18th of April, 2018, this one by sdhardie. It’s a rerun, yes, although I don’t know just from when. The copyright date of 2012 suggests I’ve probably already covered this in a Reading the Comics post before. (If I have I can’t find it.)

Eric the Circle for the 18th, this one by sdhardie, is a joke in the Venn Diagram mode. The strip’s a little unusual for not having one of the circles be named Eric. Not a new comic strip tag.

Ham’s Life on Earth for the 19th of April, 2018. I suppose that Ham is a pseudonym but I have no information about the cartoonist other than that I guess she’s not American.

Ham’s Life on Earth for the 19th leaves me feeling faintly threatened. Maybe it’s just me. Also not a new comic strip tag, somehow.

Lord Birthday’s Dumbwitch Castle for the 19th of April, 2018. I … I would swear when this comic first started appearing it was by a less absurd pseudonym. I don’t remember, though.

Lord Birthday’s Dumbwitch Castle for the 19th is a small sketch and mostly a list of jokes. This is the normal format for this strip, which tests the idea of what makes something a comic strip. I grant it’s a marginal inclusion, but I am tickled by the idea of a math slap so here you go. This one’s another new comic strip tag.