Reading the Comics, April 24, 2017: Reruns Edition

I went a little wild explaining the first of last week’s mathematically-themed comic strips. So let me split the week between the strips that I know to have been reruns and the ones I’m not so sure were.

Bill Amend’s FoxTrot for the 23rd — not a rerun; the strip is still new on Sundays — is a probability question. And a joke about story problems with relevance. Anyway, the question uses the binomial distribution. I know that because the question is about doing a bunch of things, homework questions, each of which can turn out one of two ways, right or wrong. It’s supposed to be equally likely to get the question right or wrong. It’s a little tedious but not hard to work out the chance of getting exactly six problems right, or exactly seven, or exactly eight, or so on. To work out the chance of getting six or more questions right — the problem given — there’s two ways to go about it.

One is the conceptually easy but tedious way. Work out the chance of getting exactly six questions right. Work out the chance of getting exactly seven questions right. Exactly eight questions. Exactly nine. All ten. Add these chances up. You’ll get to a number slightly below 0.377. That is, Mary Lou would have just under a 37.7 percent chance of passing. The answer’s right and it’s easy to understand how it’s right. The only drawback is it’s a lot of calculating to get there.

So here’s the conceptually harder but faster way. It works because the problem says Mary Lou is as likely to get a problem wrong as right. So she’s as likely to get exactly ten questions right as exactly ten wrong. And as likely to get at least nine questions right as at least nine wrong. To get at least eight questions right as at least eight wrong. You see where this is going: she’s as likely to get at least six right as to get at least six wrong.

There’s exactly three possibilities for a ten-question assignment like this. She can get four or fewer questions right (six or more wrong). She can get exactly five questions right. She can get six or more questions right. The chance of the first case and the chance of the last have to be the same.

So, take 1 — the chance that one of the three possibilities will happen — and subtract the chance she gets exactly five problems right, which is a touch over 24.6 percent. So there’s just under a 75.4 percent chance she does not get exactly five questions right. It’s equally likely to be four or fewer, or six or more. Just-under-75.4 divided by two is just under 37.7 percent, which is the chance she’ll pass as the problem’s given. It’s trickier to see why that’s right, but it’s a lot less calculating to do. That’s a common trade-off.

Ruben Bolling’s Super-Fun-Pax Comix rerun for the 23rd is an aptly titled installment of A Million Monkeys At A Million Typewriters. It reminds me that I don’t remember if I’d retired the monkeys-at-typewriters motif from Reading the Comics collections. If I haven’t I probably should, at least after making a proper essay explaining what the monkeys-at-typewriters thing is all about.

Ted Shearer’s Quincy from the 28th of February, 1978. So, that FoxTrot problem I did? The conceptually-easy-but-tedious way is not too hard to do if you have a calculator. It’s a buch of typing but nothing more. If you don’t have a calculator, though, the desire not to do a whole bunch of calculating could drive you to the conceptually-harder-but-less-work answer. Is that a good thing? I suppose; insight is a good thing to bring. But the less-work answer only works because of a quirk in the problem, that Mary Lou is supposed to have a 50 percent chance of getting a question right. The low-insight-but-tedious problem will aways work. Why skip on having something to do the tedious part?

Ted Shearer’s Quincy from the 28th of February, 1978 reveals to me that pocket calculators were a thing much earlier than I realized. Well, I was too young to be allowed near stuff like that in 1978. I don’t think my parents got their first credit-card-sized, solar-powered calculator that kind of worked for another couple years after that. Kids, ask about them. They looked like good ideas, but you could use them for maybe five minutes before the things came apart. Your cell phone is so much better.

Bil Watterson’s Calvin and Hobbes rerun for the 24th can be classed as a resisting-the-word-problem joke. It’s so not about that, but who am I to slow you down from reading a Calvin and Hobbes story?

Garry Trudeau’s Doonesbury rerun for the 24th started a story about high school kids and their bad geography skills. I rate it as qualifying for inclusion here because it’s a mathematics teacher deciding to include more geography in his course. I was amused by the week’s jokes anyway. There’s no hint given what mathematics Gil teaches, but given the links between geometry, navigation, and geography there is surely something that could be relevant. It might not help with geographic points like which states are in New England and where they are, though.

Zach Weinersmith’s Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal for the 24th is built on a plot point from Carl Sagan’s science fiction novel Contact. In it, a particular “message” is found in the digits of π. (By “message” I mean a string of digits that are interesting to us. I’m not sure that you can properly call something a message if it hasn’t got any sender and if there’s not obviously some intended receiver.) In the book this is an astounding thing because the message can’t be; any reasonable explanation for how it should be there is impossible. But short “messages” are going to turn up in π also, as per the comic strips.

I assume the peer review would correct the cartoon mathematicians’ unfortunate spelling of understanding.

Reading the Comics, November 16, 2016: Seeing the Return of Jokes

Comic Strip Master Command sent out a big mass of comics this past week. Today’s installment will only cover about half of them. This half does feature a number of comics that show off jokes that’ve run here before. I’m sure it was coincidence. Comic Strip Master Command must have heard I was considering alerting cartoonists that I was talking about them. That’s fine for something like last week when I could talk about NP-complete problems or why we call something a “hypotenuse”. It can start a conversation. But “here’s a joke treating numerals as if they were beings”? All they can do is agree, that is what the joke is. If they disagree at that point they’re just trying to start a funny argument.

Scott Metzger’s The Bent Pinky for the 14th sees the return of anthropomorphic numerals humor. I’m a bit surprised Metzger goes so far as to make every numeral either a 3 or a 9. I’d have expected a couple of 2’s and 4’s. I understand not wanting to get into two-digit numbers. The premise of anthropomorphic numerals is troublesome if you need multiple-digit numbers.

Jon Rosenberg’s Goats for the 14th doesn’t directly mention a mathematical topic. But the story has the characters transported to a world with monkeys at typewriters. We know where that is. So we see that return after no time away, really.

Rick Detorie’s One Big Happy rerun for the 14th sees the return of “110 percent”. Happily the joke’s structured so that we can dodge arguing about whether it’s even possible to give 110 percent. I’m inclined to say of course it’s possible. “Giving 100 percent” in the context of playing a sport would mean giving the full reasonable effort. Or it does if we want to insist on idiomatic expressions making sense. It seems late to be insisting on that standard, but some people like it as an idea.

George Herriman’s Krazy Kat for the 22nd of December, 1938. Rerun the 15th of November, 2016. Really though who could sleep when they have a sweet adding machine like that to play with? Someone who noticed that that isn’t machine tape coming out the top, of course, but rather is the punch-cards for a band organ. Curiously low-dialect installment of the comic.

George Herriman’s Krazy Kat for the 22nd of December, 1938, was rerun on Tuesday. And it’s built on counting as a way of soothing the mind into restful sleep. Mathematics as a guide to sleep also appears, in minor form, in Darrin Bell’s Candorville for the 13th. I’m not sure why counting, or mental arithmetic, is able to soothe one into sleep. I suppose it’s just that it’s a task that’s engaging enough the semi-conscious mind can do it without having the emotional charge or complexity to wake someone up. I’ve taken to Collatz Conjecture problems, myself.

Terri Libenson’s Pajama Diaries for the 16th sees the return of Venn Diagram jokes. And it’s a properly-formed Venn Diagram, with the three circles coming together to indicate seven different conditions.

Terri Libenson’s Pajama Diaries for the 16th of November, 2016. I was never one for buying too much of the bakery aisle, myself, but then I also haven’t got teenagers. And I did go through so much of my life figuring there was no reason I shouldn’t eat another bagel again.

Gary Wise and Lance Aldrich’s Real Life Adventures for the 16th just name-drops rhomboids, using them as just a funny word. Geometry is filled with wonderful, funny-sounding words. I’m fond of “icosahedron” myself. But “rhomboid” and its related words are good ones. I think they hit that sweet spot between being uncommon in ordinary language without being so exotic that a reader’s eye trips over it. However funny a “triacontahedron” might be, no writer should expect the reader to forgive that pile of syllables. A rhomboid is a kind of parallelogram, so it’s got four sides. The sides come in two parallel pairs. Both members of a pair have the same length, but the different pairs don’t. They look like the kitchen tiles you’d get for a house you couldn’t really afford, not with tiling like that.

Reading the Comics, March 31, 2015: Closing Out March Edition

It’s been another week of Comic Strip Master Command supporting my most popular regular feature around here. As sometimes happens there were so many comics in a row that I can’t catch them all up in a single post. Actually, there were enough just on the 29th of March to justify another Reading The Comics post, but I didn’t want to overload what was already a pretty busy month with more postings. This is a Gocomics.com-heavy entry, so I’m afraid folks have to click the links to see images. I hope you’ll be all right.

Mason Mastroianni, Mick Mastroianni, and Perri Hart’s B.C. (March 29) is a bit of a geography joke built around the idea that a circle hasn’t got a side. Whether it does or not — besides “inside” and “outside”, source for another joke — requires thinking carefully what you mean by a shape’s side: does it have to be straight? If it can be curved, can it curve so sharply that it looks like it’s a corner? For that matter, can you tell a circle apart from, for example, the chiliagon, a regular polygon with a thousand equal sides? (If you can, then, how about a regular polygon with a million, or a billion, or more equal sides, to the point that you can’t tell the difference?) If you can’t, then how do you know a circle was in the story at all?