Reading the Comics, March 14, 2020: Pi Day Edition

Pi Day was observed with fewer, and fewer on-point, comic strips than I had expected. It’s possible that the whimsy of the day has been exhausted. Or that Comic Strip Master Command advised people that the educational purposes of the day were going to be diffused because of the accident of the calendar. And a fair number of the strips that did run in the back half of last week weren’t substantial. So here’s what did run.

Gary Wise and Lance Aldrich’s Real Life Adventures for the 12th has a parent complaining about kids being allowed to use calculators to do mathematics. The rejoinder, asking how good they were at mathematics anyway, is a fair one.

Bill Watterson’s Calvin and Hobbes rerun for the 13th sees Calvin avoiding his mathematics homework. The strip originally ran the 16th of March, 1990.

And now we get to the strips that actually ran on the 14th of March.

Hector D Cantú and Carlos Castellanos’s Baldo for the 14th of March, 2020. Essays with some mention of Baldo are gathered at this link.

Hector D Cantú and Carlos Castellanos’s Baldo is a slightly weird one. It’s about Gracie reflecting on how much she’s struggled with mathematics problems. There are a couple pieces meant to be funny here. One is the use of oddball numbers like 1.39 or 6.23 instead of easy-to-work-with numbers like “a dollar” or “a nickel” or such. The other is that the joke is .. something in the vein of “I thought I was wrong once, but I was mistaken”. Gracie’s calculation indicates she thinks she’s struggled with a math problem a little under 0.045 times. It’s a peculiar number. Either she’s boasting that she struggles very little with mathematics, or she’s got her calculations completely wrong and hasn’t recognized it. She’s consistently portrayed as an excellent student, though. So the “barely struggles” or maybe “only struggles a tiny bit at the start of a problem” interpretation is more likely what’s meant.

Mark Parisi’s Off the Mark is a Pi Day joke that actually features π. It’s also one of the anthropomorphic-numerals variety of jokes. I had also mistaken it for a rerun. Parisi’s used a similar premise in previous Pi Day strips, including one in 2017 with π at the laptop.

Mark Parisi’s Off The Mark for the 14th of March, 2020. Other essays featuring something raised by Off The Mark, including a fair number of Pi Day jokes, are at this link.

π has infinitely many decimal digits, certainly. Of course, so does 2. It’s just that 2 has boring decimal digits. Rational numbers end up repeating some set of digits. It can be a long string of digits. But it’s finitely many, and compared to an infinitely long and unpredictable string, what’s that? π we know is a transcendental number. Its decimal digits go on in a sequence that never ends and never repeats itself fully, although finite sequences within it will repeat. It’s one of the handful of numbers we find interesting for reasons other than their being transcendental. This though nearly every real number is transcendental. I think any mathematician would bet that it is a normal number, but we don’t know that it is. I’m not aware of any numbers we know to be normal and that we care about for any reason other than their normality. And this, weirdly, also despite that we know nearly every real number is normal.

Dave Whamond’s Reality Check for the 14th of March, 2020. Essays that show off something from a Reality Check panel are at this link.

Dave Whamond’s Reality Check plays on the pun between π and pie, and uses the couple of decimal digits of π that most people know as part of the joke. It’s not an anthropomorphic numerals joke, but it is circling that territory.

Michael Cavna’s Warped for the 14th of March, 2020. The rare appearances here of Warped are gathered at this link.

Michael Cavna’s Warped celebrates Albert Einstein’s birthday. This is of marginal mathematics content, but Einstein did write compose one of the few equations that an average lay person could be expected to recognize. It happens that he was born the 14th of March and that’s, in recent years, gotten merged into Pi Day observances.

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I hope to start discussing this week’s comic strips in some essays starting next week, likely Sunday. Thanks for reading.

Reading the Comics, March 17, 2018: Pi Day 2018 Edition

So today I am trying out including images for all the mathematically-themed comic strips here. This is because of my discovery that some links even on GoComics.com vanish without warning. I’m curious how long I can keep doing this. Not for legal reasons. Including comics for the purpose of an educational essay about topics raised by the strips is almost the most fair use imaginable. Just because it’s a hassle copying the images and putting them up on WordPress.com and that’s even before I think about how much image space I have there. We’ll see. I might try to figure out a better scheme.

Also in this batch of comics are the various Pi Day strips. There was a healthy number of mathematically-themed comics on the 14th of March. Many of those were just coincidence, though, with no Pi content. I’ll group the Pi Day strips together.

Tom Batiuk’s Funky Winkerbean for the 2nd of April, 1972 and rerun the 11th of March, 2018. Maybe I’m just overbalancing for the depression porn that Funky Winkerbean has become, but I find this a funny bordering-on-existential joke.

Tom Batiuk’s Funky Winkerbean for the 2nd of April, 1972 is, I think, the first appearance of Funky Winkerbean around here. Comics Kingdom just started running the strip, as well as Bud Blake’s Tiger and Bill Hoest’s Lockhorns, from the beginning as part of its Vintage Comics roster. And this strip really belonged in Sunday’s essay, but I noticed the vintage comics only after that installment went to press. Anyway, this strip — possibly the first Sunday Funky Winkerbean — plays off a then-contemporary fear of people being reduced to numbers in the face of a computerized society. If you can imagine people ever worrying about something like that. The early 1970s were a time in American society when people first paid attention to the existence of, like, credit reporting agencies. Just what they did and how they did it drew a lot of critical examination. Josh Lauer’s recently published Creditworthy: a History of Consumer Surveillance and Financial Identity in America gets into this.

Bob Scott’s Bear With Me for the 14th of March, 2018. Every conversation with a high-need, low-self-esteem friend.

Bob Scott’s Bear With Me for the 14th sees Molly struggling with failure on a mathematics test. Could be any subject and the story would go as well, but I suppose mathematics gets a connotation of the subject everybody has to study for, even the geniuses. (The strip used to be called Molly and the Bear. In either name this seems to be the first time I’ve tagged it, although I only started tagging strips by name recently.)

Bud Fisher’s Mutt and Jeff rerun for the 14th of March, 2018. The comic strip ended the 26th of June, 1983 — I remember the announcement of its ending in the (Perth Amboy) News-Tribune, our evening paper, and thinking it seemed illicit that an ancient comic strip like that could end. It was a few months from being 76 years old then.

Bud Fisher’s Mutt and Jeff rerun for the 14th is a rerun from sometime in 1952. I’m tickled by the problem of figuring out how many times Fisher and his uncredited assistants drew Mutt and Jeff. Mutt saying that the boss “drew us 14,436 times” is the number of days in 45 years, so that makes sense if he’s counting the number of strips drawn. The number of times that Mutt and Jeff were drawn is … probably impossible to calculate. There’s so many panels each strip, especially going back to earlier and earlier times. And how many panels don’t have Mutt or don’t have Jeff or don’t have either in them? Jeff didn’t appear in the strip until March of 1908, for example, four months after the comic began. (With a different title, so the comic wasn’t just dangling loose all that while.)

Doug Savage’s Savage Chickens for the 14th of March, 2018. Yeah, William Playfair invented all these too.

Doug Savage’s Savage Chickens for the 14th is a collection of charts. Not all pie charts. And yes, it ran the 14th but avoids the pun it could make. I really like the tart charts, myself.

And now for the Pi Day strips proper.

Scott Hilburn’s The Argyle Sweater for the 14th of March, 2018. Also a free probability question, if you’re going to assume that every second of the year is equally likely to be the time of birth.

Scott Hilburn’s The Argyle Sweater for the 14th starts the Pi Day off, of course, with a pun and some extension of what makes 3/14 get its attention. And until Hilburn brought it up I’d never thought about the zodiac sign for someone born the 14th of March, so that’s something.

Mark Parisi’s Off The Mark for the 14th of March, 2018. Really the book seems a little short for that.

Mark Parisi’s Off The Mark for the 14th riffs on one of the interesting features of π, that it’s an irrational number. Well, that its decimal representation goes on forever. Rational numbers do that too, yes, but they all end in the infinite repetition of finitely many digits. And for a lot of them, that digit is ‘0’. Irrational numbers keep going on with more complicated patterns. π sure seems like it’s a normal number. So we could expect that any finite string of digits appears somewhere in its decimal expansion. This would include a string of digits that encodes any story you like, The Neverending Story included. This does not mean we might ever find where that string is.

Michael Cavna’s Warped for the 14th of March, 2018. Yes, but have you seen Pythagoras and his golden thigh?

Michael Cavna’s Warped for the 14th combines the two major joke threads for Pi Day. Specifically naming Archimedes is a good choice. One of the many things Archimedes is famous for is finding an approximation for π. He’d worked out that π has to be larger than 3¹⁰/₇₁ but smaller than 3 ¹/₇. Archimedes used an ingenious approach: we might not know the precise area of a circle given only its radius. But we can know the area of a triangle if we know the lengths of its legs. And we can draw a series of triangles that are enclosed by a circle. The area of the circle has to be larger than the sum of the areas of those triangles. We can draw a series of triangles that enclose a circle. The area of the circle has to be less than the sum of the areas of those triangles. If we use a few triangles these bounds are going to be very loose. If we use a lot of triangles these bounds can be tight. In principle, we could make the bounds as close together as we could possibly need. We can see this, now, as a forerunner to calculus. They didn’t see it as such at the time, though. And it’s a demonstration of what amazing results can be found, even without calculus, but with clever specific reasoning. Here’s a run-through of the process.

John Zakour and Scott Roberts’s Working Daze for the 15th of March, 2018. No, you should never read the comments, but here, really, don’t read the comments.

John Zakour and Scott Roberts’s Working Daze for the 15th is a response to Dr Stephen Hawking’s death. The coincidence that he did die on the 14th of March made for an irresistibly interesting bit of trivia. Zakour and Roberts could get there first, thanks to working on a web comic and being quick on the draw. (I’m curious whether they replaced a strip that was ready to go for the 15th, or whether they normally work one day ahead of publication. It’s an exciting but dangerous way to go.)

Reading the Comics, September 22, 2017: Doughnut-Cutting Edition

The back half of last week’s mathematically themed comic strips aren’t all that deep. They make up for it by being numerous. This is how calculus works, so, good job, Comic Strip Master Command. Here’s what I have for you.

Mark Anderson’s Andertoons for the 20th marks its long-awaited return to these Reading The Comics posts. It’s of the traditional form of the student misunderstanding the teacher’s explanations. Arithmetic edition.

Marty Links’s Emmy Lou for the 20th was a rerun from the 22nd of September, 1976. It’s just a name-drop. It’s not like it matters for the joke which textbook was lost. I just include it because, what the heck, might as well.

Jef Mallett’s Frazz for the 21st uses the form of a story problem. It’s a trick question anyway; there’s really no way the Doppler effect is going to make an ice cream truck’s song unrecognizable, not even at highway speeds. Too distant to hear, that’s a possibility. Also I don’t know how strictly regional this is but the ice cream trucks around here have gone in for interrupting the music every couple seconds with some comical sound effect, like a “boing” or something. I don’t know what this hopes to achieve besides altering the timeline of when the ice cream seller goes mad.

Mark Litzler’s Joe Vanilla for the 21st I already snuck in here last week, in talking about ‘x’. The variable does seem like a good starting point. And, yeah, hypothesis block is kind of a thing. There’s nothing quite like staring at a problem that should be interesting and having no idea where to start. This happens even beyond grade school and the story problems you do then. What to do about it? There’s never one thing. Study it a good while, read about related problems a while. Maybe work on something that seems less obscure a while. It’s very much like writer’s block.

Ryan North’s Dinosaur Comics rerun for the 22nd straddles the borders between mathematics, economics, and psychology. It’s a problem about making forecasts about other people’s behavior. It’s a mystery of game theory. I don’t know a proper analysis for this game. I expect it depends on how many rounds you get to play: if you have a sense of what people typically do, you can make a good guess of what they will do. If everyone gets a single shot to play, all kinds of crazy things might happen.

Jef Mallet’s Frazz gets in again on the 22nd with some mathematics gibberish-talk, including some tossing around of the commutative property. Among other mistakes Caulfield was making here, going from “less is more to therefore more is less” isn’t commutation. Commutation is about binary operations, where you match a pair of things to a single thing. The operation commutes if it never matters what the order of the pair of things is. It doesn’t commute if it ever matters, even a single time, what the order is. Commutativity gets introduced in arithmetic where there are some good examples of the thing. Addition and multiplication commute. Subtraction and division don’t. From there it gets forgotten until maybe eventually it turns up in matrix multiplication, which doesn’t commute. And then it gets forgotten once more until maybe group theory. There, whether operations commute or not is as important a divide as the one between vertebrates and invertebrates. But I understand kids not getting why they should care about commuting. Early on it seems like a longwinded way to say what’s obvious about addition.

Michael Cavna’s Warped for the 22nd is the Venn Diagram joke for this round of comics.

Bud Blake’s Tiger rerun for the 23rd of September, 2017. Do have to wonder what’s going through Julian’s head. On the one hand, he’s getting one doughnut, come what may. On the other, he’s really not needed for the joke since it would play just as well with three doughnuts to split between Hugo and Punkinhead. I suppose cutting a doughnut in thirds is more unthinkable than cutting a doughnut in half, but neither one’s an easy thing for me to imagine.

Bud Blake’s Tiger rerun for the 23rd starts with a real-world example of your classic story problem. I like the joke in it, and I also like Hugo’s look of betrayal and anger in the second panel. A spot of expressive art will do so good for a joke.

Reading the Comics, September 1, 2017: Getting Ready For School Edition

In the United States at least it’s the start of the school year. With that, Comic Strip Master Command sent orders to do back-to-school jokes. They may be shallow ones, but they’re enough to fill my need for content. For example:

Bill Amend’s FoxTrot for the 27th of August, a new strip, has Jason fitting his writing tools to the class’s theme. So mathematics gets to write “2” in a complicated way. The mention of a clay tablet and cuneiform is oddly timely, given the current (excessive) hype about that Babylonian tablet of trigonometric values, which just shows how even a nearly-retired cartoonist will get lucky sometimes.

Dan Collins’s Looks Good On Paper for the 27th does a collage of school stuff, with mathematics the leading representative of the teacher-giving-a-lecture sort of class.

Olivia Walch’s Imogen Quest for the 28th uses calculus as the emblem of stuff that would be put on the blackboard and be essential for knowing. It’s legitimate formulas, so far as we get to see, the stuff that would in fact be in class. It’s also got an amusing, to me at least, idea for getting students’ attention onto the blackboard.

Tony Carrillo’s F Minus for the 29th is here to amuse me. I could go on to some excuse about how the sextant would be used for the calculations that tell someone where he is. But really I’m including it because I was amused and I like how detailed a sketch of a sextant Carrillo included here.

Jim Meddick’s Monty for the 29th features the rich obscenity Sedgwick Nuttingham III, also getting ready for school. In this case the summer mathematics tutoring includes some not-really-obvious game dubbed Integer Ball. I confess a lot of attempts to make games out of arithmetic look to me like this: fun to do but useful in practicing skills? But I don’t know what the rules are or what kind of game might be made of the integers here. I should at least hear it out.

Michael Cavna’s Warped for the 30th lists a top ten greatest numbers, spoofing on mindless clickbait. Cavna also, I imagine unintentionally, duplicates an ancient David Letterman Top Ten List. But it’s not like you can expect people to resist the idea of making numbered lists of numbers. Some of us have a hard time stopping.

Patrick Roberts’s Todd the Dinosaur for the 1st of September, 2017. So Paul Dirac introduced to quantum mechanics a mathematical construct known as the ‘braket’. It’s written as a pair of terms, like, < A | B > . These can be separated into pieces, with < A | called the ‘bra’ and | B > the ‘ket’. We’re told in the quantum mechanics class that this was a moment of possibly “innocent” overlap between what’s a convenient mathematical name and, as a piece of women’s clothing, unending amusement to male physics students. I do not know whether that’s so. I don’t see the thrill myself except in the suggestion that great physicists might be aware of women’s clothing.

Patrick Roberts’s Todd the Dinosaur for the 1st of September mentions a bunch of mathematics as serious studies. Also, to an extent, non-serious studies. I don’t remember my childhood well enough to say whether we found that vaguely-defined thrill in the word “algebra”. It seems plausible enough.

Reading the Comics, August 12, 2017: August 10 and 12 Edition

The other half of last week’s comic strips didn’t have any prominent pets in them. The six of them appeared on two days, though, so that’s as good as a particular theme. There’s also some π talk, but there’s enough of that I don’t want to overuse Pi Day as an edition name.

Mark Anderson’s Andertoons for the 10th is a classroom joke. It’s built on a common problem in teaching by examples. The student can make the wrong generalization. I like the joke. There’s probably no particular reason seven was used as the example number to have zero interact with. Maybe it just sounded funnier than the other numbers under ten that might be used.

Mike Baldwin’s Cornered for the 10th uses a chalkboard of symbols to imply deep thinking. The symbols on the board look to me like they’re drawn from some real mathematics or physics source. There’s force equations appropriate for gravity or electric interactions. I can’t explain the whole board, but that’s not essential to work out anyway.

Marty Links’s Emmy Lou for the 17th of March, 1976 was rerun the 10th of August. It name-drops the mathematics teacher as the scariest of the set. Fortunately, Emmy Lou went to her classes in a day before Rate My Professor was a thing, so her teacher doesn’t have to hear about this.

Scott Hilburn’s The Argyle Sweater for the 12th is a timely remidner that Scott Hilburn has way more Pi Day jokes than we have Pi Days to have. Also he has octopus jokes. It’s up to you to figure out whether the etymology of the caption makes sense.

John Zakour and Scott Roberts’s Working Daze for the 12th presents the “accountant can’t do arithmetic” joke. People who ought to be good at arithmetic being lousy at figuring tips is an ancient joke. I’m a touch surprised that Christopher Miller’s American Cornball: A Laffopedic Guide to the Formerly Funny doesn’t have an entry for tips (or mathematics). But that might reflect Miller’s mission to catalogue jokes that have fallen out of the popular lexicon, not merely that are old.

Michael Cavna’s Warped for the 12th is also a Pi Day joke that couldn’t wait. It’s cute and should fit on any mathematics teacher’s office door.