Trigonometry Jones & the Ancient Hex

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(C)Copyright 2019, C. Burke.

This was originally supposed to have a "Focus!" "Directrix!" joke. That didn't happen. Probably because of how I drew the rope bridge.

Plus I knew I wanted the Trigger joke more. Oddly, the hardest part were the villains, who were originally the upside-down triangles from Temple of Duran, and then a title. Good thing I went with Hexagons, I guess!




Come back often for more funny math and geeky comics.

It's All About The Year, The New Year ... 2015

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(C)Copyright 2015, C. Burke.

And you know that he probably does, too.

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

The new year, 2015, brings some interesting numbers when converted into other bases. Granted, I find most numbers interesting in some way, but these still have interesting features.

In base 2 (binary), we have a palindrome; it's the same backward. The 0 in the middle means that we are 32 years away from all 1s and 33 away from rolling over the counter and adding another digit.

In base 3 (trinary), the number can be broken down into 2 20 21 22, which is somewhat sequential.

In base 4 (tetranary(?), ah skip it!), which is related to base 2 by virtue of being a power of 2, we get 133 133. It's not the palindrome that base 2 is; it's something more fun!

I don't have much to say about bases 5, 6, or 7. They have pairs of numbers, but that's hardly surprising. Two of them look like zip codes, so I checked: 31030 is Fort Valley, Georgia and 13155 in an area of upstate New York, south of Syracuse. (I thought it might be a section of Queens, in New York City, which is why I checked. Nope.) Last year, base 5 was 31024, which had all five available numbers in it, but we're a year too late for that.

In base 8 (octal), another power of 2, we get another repetition: 3737. Wonderful.

In base 9, meh. I hope everyone could figure out what base 10 was, so I skipped it. Base 11 likewise is boring as no alphabetic characters were required to substitute for numbers greater than 9.

In base 12, it gets interesting. While 12 is a multiple of 2, it isn't a power of 2. Using alphabetic characters, it's 11BB, but the "B" is a stand in for 11, so it's actually 1,1,11,11. Practically binary! (But it's not.) Note: in bases larger than 10, such as Sexagesimal, it is common to write the numbers in decimal form (no letters) and separate the powers with commas.

In base 13, we have 11, 12, 0 because the year is divisible by 13. Last year was 11, 11, 12. The year before 11, 11, 11. (You see: there's always something to be found!)

Finishing up, in base 14, 10 and 3 make 13. And we end with snoozy bases 15 and 16 (hexadecimal), which aren't all that interesting this year, although next year is 7E0 or 7, 14, 0. Something to look forward to!

HEX

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


The character, 'Leven Hex, dates back to April 2008, but I held off because I had just done a comic book strip at the end of March, and I ran
hex-based 0'Factor instead.
And then I never got around to doing this one. Things happen.

I spent a lot more time on this one than I had expected to. And I probably could've spent even more, but I had to finally let it go. And then I updated it again this morning because I thought it was too tall and there was a lot of empty, blue sky. And I still didn't get around to adding any grass by the pond, or mixing any green in the water.

If you're curious, I looked through a lot of covers to find the right look.