Mathletes Unite!
I started this blog out of frustration at how much the daily funny pages sucked. How angry some of them made me. How reading the back page of the daily "Lifestyles" section felt like my own personal Pleasantville. Then I felt the pressure of trying to write daily for the blog and felt the need to come up with "themes." This ultimately led to the theme of discussing every strip in the Raleigh News & Observer. Now I find myself mired in a fairly long stretch of comics that are, well . . . not bad. And that's surprising.
Now, "not bad" is damning with faint praise. If I were interviewing for a new job, and my potential employer called up my references, and they said I was "not bad" . . . Would I get that job? No I would not. Still, the "not bad"-nessof so many of the comics surprises me, to say the least. Do I watch TV shows that are "not bad?" No, they get axed from my viewing list. Do I watch movies that are "not bad?" Not if I can help it. "Not bad" books? They get set aside after about Chapter 3. Do I listen to "not bad" music? Not since ITunes - no longer am I forced to buy the whole Chumbawumba CD just because I like one song (oops, there's my 90s groove showing again; I DID buy "Stacey's Mom" without having to buy the whole Fountains of Wayne CD.) On the funny pages, though, "not bad" is pretty darn good. That doesn't speak well of the state of our funny pages today, but it's better than I thought.
Speaking of "not bad," next on the N&O list is Foxtrot. Foxtrot's not bad. It's a family comic, but fairly up-to-date, and at times funny. There's not a lot to it, aside from the incredibly geeky younger son Jason, but that'll do. This year for Christmas, Jason wrote a "MERRY CHRISTMAS" card in all math. For instance, for the "E" in "Merry" he had "mc²" (that's Einstein's theory of relativity, folks). Somehow he found a math or science reference for everything in "MERRY CHRISTMAS."
I didn't enjoy that strip as much as I did the letters to the editor that followed. See, the N&O serves a geographic region that includes 3 major research universities (UNC, Duke, and NC State), at least 4 other smaller colleges, and a huge industrial park that includes pharamaceutical, software, and engineering R&D companies (Research Triangle Park -- it covers an area larger than Chapel Hill). So, what happened when this Foxtrot appeared? Every day for about a week, the paper ran a letter to the editor explaining something that "Jason" had done wrong. The fact that you can (or can't, I don't remember -- and don't care, don't email me) take the square root of a negative number. About why some of his other equations, while mathematically correct do not actually represent the physical state. And etcetera
Ah. The geek quotient is pretty high around here. That works out well for me, as it lowers my relative geek quotient. Somewhere like Las Vegas I may seem pretty geeky, but here . . . I'm pretty low on the geek list.
Foxtrot's Creepy Clown rating: 1.5 Creepy Clowns (1 C.C. = awesome comic; 5 C.C. = it sucks).
Now, "not bad" is damning with faint praise. If I were interviewing for a new job, and my potential employer called up my references, and they said I was "not bad" . . . Would I get that job? No I would not. Still, the "not bad"-nessof so many of the comics surprises me, to say the least. Do I watch TV shows that are "not bad?" No, they get axed from my viewing list. Do I watch movies that are "not bad?" Not if I can help it. "Not bad" books? They get set aside after about Chapter 3. Do I listen to "not bad" music? Not since ITunes - no longer am I forced to buy the whole Chumbawumba CD just because I like one song (oops, there's my 90s groove showing again; I DID buy "Stacey's Mom" without having to buy the whole Fountains of Wayne CD.) On the funny pages, though, "not bad" is pretty darn good. That doesn't speak well of the state of our funny pages today, but it's better than I thought.
Speaking of "not bad," next on the N&O list is Foxtrot. Foxtrot's not bad. It's a family comic, but fairly up-to-date, and at times funny. There's not a lot to it, aside from the incredibly geeky younger son Jason, but that'll do. This year for Christmas, Jason wrote a "MERRY CHRISTMAS" card in all math. For instance, for the "E" in "Merry" he had "mc²" (that's Einstein's theory of relativity, folks). Somehow he found a math or science reference for everything in "MERRY CHRISTMAS."
I didn't enjoy that strip as much as I did the letters to the editor that followed. See, the N&O serves a geographic region that includes 3 major research universities (UNC, Duke, and NC State), at least 4 other smaller colleges, and a huge industrial park that includes pharamaceutical, software, and engineering R&D companies (Research Triangle Park -- it covers an area larger than Chapel Hill). So, what happened when this Foxtrot appeared? Every day for about a week, the paper ran a letter to the editor explaining something that "Jason" had done wrong. The fact that you can (or can't, I don't remember -- and don't care, don't email me) take the square root of a negative number. About why some of his other equations, while mathematically correct do not actually represent the physical state. And etcetera
Ah. The geek quotient is pretty high around here. That works out well for me, as it lowers my relative geek quotient. Somewhere like Las Vegas I may seem pretty geeky, but here . . . I'm pretty low on the geek list.
Foxtrot's Creepy Clown rating: 1.5 Creepy Clowns (1 C.C. = awesome comic; 5 C.C. = it sucks).
posted by big al at 9:15 PM
4 Comments:
The square root of negative one is not a real number.
Because #VALUE didn't exist before Excel, math geeks called this number an imaginary number and creatively picked the letter "i" to denote it.
Funny, I received a Christmas greeting where someone had done something similar. I wish I would have kept it. Of course, it came from a former Nuke (no, not Mayer).
Laura
I think that square root of a negative is how Jason got the "i" in Christmas. But, I recall that at least one of the letters to the editor was about that very issue.
Laura, you don't get Christmas cards from the Mayer? too bad.
Foxtrot is actually my favorite comic. I don't know if I can say that it's my favorite comic of all time and mean it, because Calvin & Hobbes and the Far Side were fantastic, but I can red FoxTrot all day long and laugh my ass off at it and just feel good in general. It's at least my favorite "active" comic if not my favorite of all time.
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