Snow Days

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(C)Copyright 2010, C. Burke. All rights reserved.


This comic is a couple days late because I was out shoveling snow. And then resting my back and sore muscles.

Ironically(*), this one occurred to me back in the beginning of the summer. I made a note to remember it. I didn't need the note as it turns out because I wound up living it.

(*) - Ever notice how people overuse "ironically" when they really mean "co-incidentally"? Who am I to go against the popular tide?

Christmas Graph 2010

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(C)Copyright 2010, C. Burke. All rights reserved.


For full credit, you need to label the lines and put a big 'S' ornament in the center. Or buy me lots of presents.

Troll

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(C)Copyright 2010, C. Burke. All rights reserved.


Fa la la la la, la la la la!

Carol dates back to a Bard's Tale rip-off I developed as a side project back in the mid-80s on my office's mainframe. It was written in a couple thousand lines of COBOL. Of course, those images were ASCII graphics.

Bases

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(C)Copyright 2010, C. Burke. All rights reserved.


It was supposed to just be the Christmas specials, but I couldn't pass up the other ones.
The images were found around the web.

Once Upon a Time, There was a Card Game named Guardians...

Back in the mid-90s, there was a glut of collectible card games, also called trading card games. Many were quickly-produced, jump-on-the-bandwagon, make-a-quick-buck games, which tried to cash in on the success of Magic: the Gathering.

One game that was better than all that was FPG's Guardians. It was fun to plan, had great artwork and simple rules. And it didn't take itself too seriously. Sadly, I discovered this game right about the time the company decided to discontinue it.

That didn't bother me much, because there was a fan base on usenet and a handful of webpages. In fact, at one point, I had risen in the ranks of geekdom to have been the go-to guy for information if you couldn't find a representative from FPG. (Paging Dave Gentzler! Paging Dave Gentzler!) Folks said that if you stopped by my webpage, you might learn a thing or two. (I'd point you to the webpage, but I really need to take it down as I haven't used that account in many, many years even though I'm still paying for it. But I digress...)

When I posted on usenet, and later on a mailing list, I used to add what I called ".sig cards", homebrew card ideas which might've been serious or silly or possibly related to whatever I was posting. (As an aside, the idea to try to have different funny signatures came from following a Master, the late John M. Ford. If only I could be that good!)

I have recently discovered (as in a half-hour ago) that there is a Guardians blog (which I knew about) which has been taking my ideas and creating cards out of them using artwork from some of the original contributors of the game. He specifically took my cards and wanted to make a set out of them. In fact, he started this past May and just finished, and I discovered it accidentally while looking for something else.

Okay, now this doesn't have much to do with math, other than stuff about Probability and Statistics and Game Theory and the fact that Magic was created by a mathematician, but it's something I'm proud of, and I would like to share it with as many people as I can.

And it's frikkin' cool.

My .sig cards, as imagined by Jackalware.

NPR

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(C)Copyright 2010, C. Burke. All rights reserved.


And NCR stands for National Cash Register, which is good when you order a Combo meal.

But Wait! There's More!

Everyone who found this blog because StumbleUpon sent you to this comic, also entitled But Wait, There's More!, look around. There are other hidden gems waiting to be discovered.

In the meantime, thanks for the 4,000 hits over the past two days, which is roughly 20-40 times my normal traffic!

State Capitals

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(C)Copyright 2010, C. Burke. All rights reserved.


Juneau, you can look it up online?

A Late Leslie Nielsen Comic

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(C)Copyright 2010, C. Burke. All rights reserved.


Your mind tricks won't work on Leslie Nielsen.
And, technically, it's a late Late Leslie Nielsen comic,

which references this comic.

Math & Technology

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(C)Copyright 2010, C. Burke. All rights reserved.


I know people like this.
Sometimes I *am* people like this.
I can only imagine what poor Michele is thinking caught in the middle there.

Student Excuse Functions

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(C)Copyright 2010, C. Burke. All rights reserved.


But you didn't.

The Saddest Function

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(C)Copyright 2010, C. Burke. All rights reserved.


Coming Soon: the Top Excuse Functions for Students!

Applying the Fundamentals

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(C)Copyright 2010, C. Burke. All rights reserved.


It's always the same old story, a case of x or y... And I'm shocked -- SHOCKED! -- to find math in this comic!

Numerical Turn of Phrase

I enjoy numbers, and I enjoy reading even though I don't always enjoy reading about numbers because it can get very tedious. Nevertheless, occasionally someone puts chocolate in my peanut butter (or gets peanut butter on my chocolate), and you get something like this:

"Samia of Fife was five feet tall, exactly, and all sixty inches of her were in a state of quivering exasperation. She weighed one and a half pounds per inch and, at the moment, each of her ninety pounds represented sixteen ounces of solid anger."

I just enjoyed that line and thought it a great way to open a chapter and introduce a character. And two things occurred to me only as I type it: even though it's science fiction, the measurements are not in metric, and the weight of 90 pounds is given without any consideration for actual gravity of the planet. What would the Galactic Empire think?

Unfortunately, I was left scratching my head by a phrase used two pages later:

"... made her an object of mild derision to people who were accustomed to thinking of the aristocratic Ladies of Sark as devoted entirely to the glitter of polite society and, eventually, acting as incubators for at least, but no more than, two future Squires of Sark."

Now, since "at least" means no less than, what this sentence is saying is that ever "Lady" is expected to have no less than nor no more than two children. In other words, two children. Now, I'd want to call this guy some kind of hack, but since it was Isaac Asimov, most would likely disagree with me.

So, okay, so maybe "hack" is too strong, but it was still a weird way to say "two and only two", or simply "exactly two".

Four-Color Theorem

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(C)Copyright 2010, C. Burke. All rights reserved.


According to the Four-Color Theorem, four crayons should be enough to color in any turkey.

This year, I'm thanking for places like Raising Our Kids for having pictures of turkeys to color in because I didn't have the time nor patience to make my own. For that matter, I didn't have the patience to color in a turkey that had 2 or 3 times the number of sections. (And let's not even get into the grayscale pixelation issues!)

Happy Thanksgiving!

New Additions

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(C)Copyright 2010, C. Burke. All rights reserved.


The last of the original sketches from the year before I started the comic. It was on the back of an index card and slightly faded, so it didn't scan too well, but you get the idea.

It's About Time

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(C)Copyright 2010, C. Burke. All rights reserved.


B.C. or not B.C, that is the question ...

You know why there is no metric time? Because they tried it and everyone thought it was stupid.
A cm is not the same as an inch, a meter is not a yard, a liter is not a quart, so "BCE" should not be the same as "B.C."

If they need a new calendar with a different start date, might I suggest "After Ford"?

Try, Try Again

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(C)Copyright 2010, C. Burke. All rights reserved.


Yes, it should be "Seven of Thirteen", but any geek would rather have "Seven of Nine".

Banach-Tarski Comics

In the comments on reddit about this Luke Surl comic involving Banach-Tarski, there was the following list of Banach-Tarski-inspired comics:


http://mrburkemath.blogspot.com/2009/10/humpty-dumpty.html

http://brownsharpie.courtneygibbons.org/?p=82

http://spikedmath.com/234.html

http://www.irregularwebcomic.net/2339.html

I was happy to be included. 8-)

On the Run

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(C)Copyright 2010, C. Burke. All rights reserved.


They should catch it. It's a relatively slow bus.

Frigg's Day

Friday is "Frigg's Day" name for Frigg, the Norse Goddess of Foreknowledge.

This explains why when I walked into a classroom today which had gone bezerk and hollered, "What's friggin' goin' on?", I already knew the answer even before I asked.

Mouse Troubles

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(C)Copyright 2010, C. Burke. All rights reserved.


The farmer's wife and his grandfather clock -- oh, the murinity!

Minus X? Why?

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(C)Copyright 2010, C. Burke. All rights reserved.


I hope branching out into a new quadrant doesn't reflect poorly on the comic.

This bonus comic brought to you courtesy of "Supplyman" and "SpikedMath".
Yes, my own stuff is coming...

Transcendental Addition

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(C)Copyright 2010, C. Burke. All rights reserved.


Some numbers transcend ordinary mathematics the way a good pie transcends ordinary desserts.

Oddly enough, it isn't known whether the sum of pi and e is transcendental.

Evenly enough, this comic was suggested from a comment made on a recent Spiked Math comic.

Daylight Savings

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(C)Copyright 2010, C. Burke. All rights reserved.


And the funny thing isn't that I get to go back to "EST", but that everyone I know uses the abbreviation "EST" all year long even when "EDT" would be correct (for those in the Eastern Time Zone).

Spiked Math / Geeky Comic Shout-out

Mike at Spiked Math has shout-outs to (x, why?) and other geeky webcomics in this comic of his own.

More Fractals

Too good not to repost:


see more So Much Pun

Happy Halloween! / Merry Christmas!

Yes, it's a Merry Christmas! for all mathematicians because, as everybody knows:

31 OCT = 25 DEC

Okay, lame joke, which has been told a million times, which is why I didn't put it in a cartoon.

No Halloween comic this year because Real Life caused me to be away. Oops. Be back to a semi-regular schedule soon.

R's Cube

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(C)Copyright 2010, C. Burke. All rights reserved.


Not to imply that grading standards, while somewhat adjustable, are totally interchangable just by rotating your position 90 degrees ...

Benoit Mandelbrot

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(C)Copyright 2010, C. Burke. All rights reserved.


This conversation, more or less, occurred in the Teacher Center a few days ago.

Happy Birthday!

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(C)Copyright 2010, C. Burke. All rights reserved.


Happy Third Birthday to (x, why?)!

When I was writing this up, I remembered that in the opening of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (maybe that should be 4um??), Psuedolus holds up the masks of Comedy and Tragedy -- except that both
are Comedy, so he turns one upside-down and ...

Oh, great! Now I have "Something familiar, something peculiar, something for everyone ..." running through my head!

Third Anniversary This Sunday

The blog itself might be a little bit older, but this Sunday, October 24, 2010, marks three years since I first posted the Co-medians strip, which started something that I never expected to last as long as it has. So far, 528 strips had been posted, which is an average of 176 per year. An average of a little less than one strip every two days. Not bad when I'm shooting for three times per week (more or less).

Barring any unforeseen problems in the next couple of days, there will be something posted on Sunday.

What You Gonna Do?

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(C)Copyright 2010, C. Burke. All rights reserved.


I spent a lot of time on the dialgoue. And then realized it worked better without any.
Same with the bonus text.

Chekhov's Gun

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(C)Copyright 2010, C. Burke. All rights reserved.


Must be the radiation.

EDIT: FYI: The variation in spelling was to prevent giving away part of the joke in the title.