Reading the Comics, March 25, 2020: Regular Old Mathematics Mentions Edition

I haven’t forgotten about the comic strips. It happens that last week’s were mostly quite casual mentions, strips that don’t open themselves up to deep discussions. I write this before I see what I actually have to write about the strips. But here’s the first half of the past week’s. I’ll catch up on things soon.

Bill Amend’s FoxTrot for the 22nd, a new strip, has Jason and Marcus using arithmetic problems to signal pitches. At heart, the signals between a pitcher and catcher are just an index. They’re numbers because that’s an easy thing to signal given that one only has fingers and that they should be visually concealed. I would worry, in a pattern as complicated as these two would work out, about error correction. If one signal is mis-read — as will happen — how do they recognize it, and how do they fix it? This may seem like a lot of work to put to a trivial problem, but to conceal a message is important, whatever the message is.

Bill Amend’s FoxTrot for the 22nd of March, 2020. Essays mentioning either the new-run, Sunday, strips or the rerun, weekday, FoxTrot strips are gathered at this link.

Jerry Scott and Jim Borgman’s Zits for the 23rd has Jeremy preparing for a calculus test. Could be any subject.

James Beutel’s Banana Triangle for the 23rd has a character trying to convince himself of his intelligence. And doing so by muttering mathematics terms, mostly geometry. It’s a common shorthand to represent deep thinking.

Tom Batiuk’s Funky Winkerbean Vintage strip for the 24th, originally run the 13th of May, 1974, is wordplay about acute triangles.

Hector D Cantú and Carlos Castellanos’s Baldo for the 25th has Gracie work out a visual joke about plus signs. Roger Price, name-checked here, is renowned for the comic feature Droodles, extremely minimalist comic panels. He also, along with Get Smart’s Leonard Stern, created Mad Libs.

Zach Weinersmith’s Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal for the 25th of March, 2020. It is quite common for me to write about this strip. You can see me explaining Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal at this link.

Zach Weinersmith’s Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal for the 25th is a joke about orders of magnitude. The order of magnitude is, roughly, how big the number is. Often the first step of a physics problem is to try to get a calculation that’s of the right order of magnitude. Or at least close to the order of magnitude. This may seem pretty lax. If we want to find out something with value, say, 231, it seems weird to claim victory that our model says “it will be a three-digit number”. But getting the size of the number right is a first step. For many problems, particularly in cosmology or astrophysics, we’re intersted in things whose functioning is obscure. And relies on quantities we can measure very poorly. This is why we can see getting the order magnitude about right as an accomplishment.

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There’s another half-dozen strips from last week that at least mention mathematics. I’ll at least mention them soon, in an essay at this link. Thank you.

Reading the Comics, January 18, 2020: Decimals In Fractions Edition

Let me first share the other comic strips from last week which mentioned mathematics, but in a casual way.

Jerry Scott and Jim Borgman’s Zits for the 14th used the phrase “do the math”, and snarked on the younger generation doing mathematics. This was as part of the longrunning comic’s attempt to retcon the parents from being Baby Boomers to being Generation X. Scott and Borgman can do as they like but, I mean, their kids are named Chad and Jeremy. That’s only tenable if they’re Boomers. (I’m not sure Chad has returned from college in the past ten years.) And even then it was marginal.

John Kovaleski’s Bo Nanas rerun for the 14th is a joke about the probability of birthdays.

Zach Weinersmith’s Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal for the 14th features “the Bertrand Russell Drinking Game”, playing on the famous paradox about self-referential statements of logic.

Stephan Pastis’s Pearls Before Swine for the 17th has Rat use a bunch of mathematical jargon to give his declarations authority.

Cy Olson’s Office Hours for the 18th, rerunning a strip from the 9th of November, 1971, is in the line of jokes about parents not understanding their children’s arithmetic. It doesn’t seem to depend on mocking the New Math, which is a slight surprise for a 1971 comic.

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Mark Anderson’s Andertoons for the 12th of January, 2020. This and other essays with some topic raised by Andertoons should appear at this link.

So Mark Anderson’s Andertoons for the 12th is the only comic strip of some substance that I noticed last week. You see what a slender month it’s been. It does showcase the unsettling nature of seeing notations for similar things mixed. It’s not that there’s anything which doesn’t parse about having decimals in the numerator or denominator. It just looks weird. And that can be enough to throw someone out of a problem. They might mistake the problem for one that doesn’t have a coherent meaning. Or they might mistake it for one too complicated to do. Learning to not be afraid of a problem that looks complicated is worth doing. As is learning how to tell whether a problem parses at all, even if it looks weird.

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And that’s an end to last week in comics. I plan to have a fresh Reading the Comics post on Sunday. Thank you for reading in the meanwhile.

Reading the Comics, October 2017: Mathematics Anxiety Edition

Comic Strip Master Command hasn’t had many comics exactly on mathematical points the past week. I’ll make do. There are some that are close enough for me, since I like the comics already. And enough of them circle around people being nervous about doing mathematics that I have a title for this edition.

Tony Cochrane’s Agnes for the 24th talks about math anxiety. It’s not a comic strip that will do anything to resolve anyone’s mathematics anxiety. But it’s funny about its business. Agnes usually is; it’s one of the less-appreciated deeply-bizarre comics out there.

John Atkinson’s Wrong Hands for the 24th might be the anthropomorphic numerals joke for this week. Or it might be the anthropomorphic letters joke. Or something else entirely.

Charles Schulz’s Peanuts for the 24th reruns the comic from the 2nd of November, 1970. It has Sally discovering that multiplication is much easier than she imagined. As it is, she’s not in good shape. But if you accept ‘tooty-two’ as another name for ‘four’ and ‘threety-three’ as another name for ‘nine’, why not? And she might do all right in group theory. In that you can select a bunch of things, called ‘elements’, and describe their multiplication to fit anything you like, provided there’s consistency. There could be a four-forty-four if that seems to answer some question.

Steve Kelley and Jeff Parker’s Dustin for the 25th of October, 2017. The kid’s premise this week is about advice for maximizing trick-or-treating hauls. So it circles around sabermetrics and the measurement of every possible metric relevant to a situation. It’s a bit baffling to me, since I just do not remember the quality of a costume relating to how much candy I’d gotten. Nor to what I give out, at least once you get past “high school kid not even bothering to dress up”. And even they’ll get a couple pieces although, yeah, if they did anything they’d get the full-size peanut butter cups. (We’re trying to build a reputation here.) What I’m saying is, I don’t see how the amount of candy depends on more than “have a costume” and “spend more time out there”. I mean, are people really withholding the fruit-flavored Tootsie Rolls because some eight-year-old doesn’t have an exciting enough costume? Really?

Steve Kelley and Jeff Parker’s Dustin for the 25th might be tied in to mathematics anxiety. At least it expresses how the thought of mathematics will cause some people to shut down entirely. Shame for them, but I can’t deny it’s so.

Hilary Price’s Rhymes with Orange for the 26th of October, 2017. The signature also credits Rina Piccolo, late of Six Chix and Tina’s Groove. The latter strip ended in July 2017, and she left the former last year. Maybe she’s picking up some hours part-timing on Rhymes With Orange; her signature’s been on many strips recently. Wikipedia doesn’t have anything relevant to say, and the credit on the web site doesn’t reflect Piccolo’s work, if she is a regular coauthor now.

Hilary Price’s Rhymes with Orange for the 26th is a calculator joke, made explicitly magical. I’m amused but also wonder if those are small wizards or large mushrooms. And it brings up again the question: why do mathematics teachers care about seeing how you got the answer? Who cares, as long as the answer is right? And my answer there is that yeah, sometimes all we care about is the answer. But more often we care about why someone knows the answer is this instead of that. The argument about what makes this answer right — or other answers wrong — should make it possible to tell why. And it often will help inform other problems. Being able to use the work done for one problem to solve others, or better, a whole family of problems, is fantastic. It’s the sort of thing mathematicians naturally try to do.

Jason Poland’s Robbie and Bobby for the 26th is an anthropomorphic geometry joke. And it’s a shape joke I don’t remember seeing, at least not under my Reading the Comics line of jokes. (Maybe I’ve just forgotten). Also, trapezoids: my most popular post of all time ever, even though it’s only got a couple months’ lead on the other perennial favorite, about how many grooves are on a record’s side.

Jerry Scott and Jim Borgman’s Zits for the 27th of October, 2017. I understand people who don’t find Zits a particularly strong comic. (My experience is it’s more loved by my parent’s cohort than by mine.) But I will say when Scott and Borgman go for visual metaphor the strip is easily ten times better. I think the cartoonists have some editorial-cartoon experience and they’ll sometimes put it to good use.

Jerry Scott and Jim Borgman’s Zits for the 27th uses mathematics as the emblem of complicated stuff in need of study. It’s a good visual. I have to say Jeremy’s material seems unorganized to start with, though.