Pi Piper

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(C)Copyright 2023, C. Burke. "AnthroNumerics" is a trademark of Christopher J. Burke and (x, why?).

Happy Pi Day!

Update: Why, yes, I did post a nearly but not quite finished comic earlier this afternoon. I was afraid I wouldn't get back to it if something else came up as I left work or any time after (and things have been coming up). And this is a timely comic that can't wait for tomorrow. Thankfully, I got to put the final tweeks in place.

For all the Pi jokes I've used, most seem to fall in the pie or pirate category, along with "pi rates", not to mention Sherlock Pi (P.I.). So I guess it's understandable how I haven't touch on this one in the past 15 years.

I also write Fiction! You can now order Devilish And Divine, edited by John L. French and Danielle Ackley-McPhail, which contains (among many, many others) three stories by me, Christopher J. Burke about those above us and from down below. Order the softcover or ebook at Amazon. Also, check out In A Flash 2020, by Christopher J. Burke for 20 great flash fiction stories, perfectly sized for your train rides. Available in softcover or ebook at Amazon. If you enjoy it, please consider leaving a rating or review on Amazon or on Good Reads.

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Hot Tub Teacher Machine

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(C)Copyright 2021, C. Burke. "AnthroNumerics" is a trademark of Christopher J. Burke and (x, why?).

This is what school is, after hours, in the minds of some of my students.

Obviously, this is the reason students are kept out of the teacher room.

I took most of this last week of school off from creating comics just because I was a little tired. The comics I was going to create will be presented a little out of sequence in the coming days.

To all the teachers out there, Enjoy your summer!

I also write Fiction! Check out In A Flash 2020, by Christopher J. Burke for 20 great flash fiction stories, perfectly sized for your train rides. Available in softcover or ebook at Amazon. If you enjoy it, please consider leaving a rating or review on Amazon or on Good Reads. Thank you.

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Then And a Venn

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(C)Copyright 2020, C. Burke. "AnthroNumerics" is a trademark of Christopher J. Burke and (x, why?).

How can I make a Math out of this?

So many different titles came to mind for Venn puns, but this one fit the theme of the comic best, I think.

Temp image because I didn't want to wait until tonight to post, but the amount of software available for macs and ipads is a bit restricting -- in terms of what I can use online or download, in addition to not having a learning curve that suggests it would be better to wait until I get home.
Edit: The temp image has been removed. A smaller version is below>

The above comic came to mind when the subject of The Masked Singer recently came up. (I haven't watched it.) And I related how many people online are discovering that Donny Osmond is, no joke, talented, discovering him from "Weird" Al videos and Mulan. (Some people had no idea he was on the soundtrack.)

I once zapped someone who was defending Osmond, talking about his fame in the 60s and 70s, and said, "He used to be big!"
I replied, "He's still big! It's the music that got small!!"

I blew out a few minds before someone gave up the source of my comment.


The original Temporary image, somewhat reduced:

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What Do You Call a Line That Crosses Two Other Lines?

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(C)Copyright 2020, C. Burke. "AnthroNumerics" is a trademark of Christopher J. Burke and (x, why?).

And sometimes transversals can even be triple crossers! So watch out!

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Alternate Interior

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(C)Copyright 2020, C. Burke. "AnthroNumerics" is a trademark of Christopher J. Burke and (x, why?).
Clear, crisp lines will define any space you design.

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Relation

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(C)Copyright 2019, C. Burke.

I think it's mapped out pretty well.

The function is left as an exercise for the reader.




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Random Sketch

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(C)Copyright 2018, C. Burke.

Emphasis on the 'RANDOM' as it was just one of those things that occurs to me...




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Art Room

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(C)Copyright 2018, C. Burke.

So this happened ...




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Fistful

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(C)Copyright 2017, C. Burke.

If they bring pencils, that's good. If they need one every day, that's bad. When I run out, it gets ugly.

This started as a quick sketch on a tablet. I have to stop doing those -- the cleanup took over three hours!




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Orbit Memory

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(C)Copyright 2017, C. Burke.

Cost a lot of Bucks ... and was gone in a Flash!

If the worksheets on the flip side of the original sketches are any indication, this pun has been waiting to happen since about 2009.

I didn't have the skills then (and, frankly, I don't really have them now, but I try more).

Whatever the scientist's name was supposed to have been is lost to time (and my own faulty Memory). Victor Vargos was the name of the scientist is a schlock satire I wrote shortly after college. He was a good guy and saved the world, but I felt I needed a name here.

And I was already days late, and switched up my comic at the late moment in the process.




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Devil in the Details

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(C)Copyright 2014, C. Burke.

Not just improper, but infernal!

Putting Down Roots

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(C)Copyright 2014, C. Burke.

They're always trying to put down those radicals!

I haven't hand-drawn one in a while. This one was touched up on the PC, instead of going over the original with a Sharpie.

$1.98 Mathematics, Part 2

A couple years ago, I was walking about a 99-cent store and found a quad-ruled composition notebook and a box of colored pencils. Total: $1.98. I played around with them for a while, and then they were put in a draw and forgotten about. Until recently when I found the notebook. And then last week, I posted a sketch for those pages.

Here is another one:

This was actually the first sketch from the book, but is wasn't as colorful as the other one. And it seemed to be more boring. But is it really?

The sketch (and you can click on the image for a larger version) shows a Golden Spiral created by connecting the diagonals of adjoining squares. The length of the sides of each square are determined by using the next number in the Fibonacci sequence. Obviously, the squares increased in size so quickly that I couldn't finish the 34 x 34 square.

But there was something else I noticed. I had added extra diagonals to some of the rectangles that were created in addition to the squares. I highlighted one of them in red (on the scan -- it's in pencil on the original sketch). The red line appears to be the diagonal for many of the rectangles. Four of them, in fact.

How could that possibly be the case?
(If any of my students are reading this, STOP here and look at it. Investigate. See if you can figure it out. Come back when you have it or you've had enough. I'll wait.)

The four rectangles have the following sizes: 2 x 1, 5 x 3, 13 x 8 and 34 x 21. Zooming in shows that the red line really isn't a diagonal of the smallest rectangle, so let's discard that one for a moment. The others are close enough to be errors in sketching. Since the slope of a straight line has to be constant, if we calculate the slope at any two points, we should get the same number.

Slope can be calculated as rise over run or change in vertical over change in horizontal. (You remember that "delta y / delta x" thing I keep mentioning in class? Yeah, that.)

So we have slopes of 3/5, 8/13, and 21/34, which are definitely not equivalent fractions. (How do we know that?)

If we convert those fractions to decimals, look what we get:3/5 = 0.6
8/13 = 0.615384...
21/34 = 0.617647...
and if the paper had been bigger, we might have seen
55/89 = 0.6179775...
144/233 = 0.61802565...

So the slopes are nearly identical meaning that the diagonal of the big rectangle isn't really the diagonal of the others, but it's really, really close.

Extra points if anyone keeps going, or if they can tell me the significance of a particular number that starts 0.61803...

$1.98 Mathematics

A couple years ago, I was walking about a 99-cent store and found a quad-ruled composition notebook and a box of colored pencils. Total: $1.98. I played around with them for a while and then they were put in a draw and forgotten about. Until recently when I found the notebook.

Here's one of the pictures:

There's a few things going on here. First, there's the demonstrations that two triangular numbers make a square. Second, the overall illustration shows that the sum of consecutive cubes is equal to the square of a triangular number.

Written on paper, there seems to be no reason why:
1³ + 2³ + 3³ + 4³ + 5³ = 15²,
(with 15 being the 5th triangular number)
But the visual shows it to be true. There is one box in the corner, bordering two 2x2 boxes, bordering three 3 x 3 boxes. Granted, I cheated in that all the even numbers contain two rectangles that are 1/2n x n.

I didn't finish coloring it. Probably got bored. Likewise, in the actual notebook, the bottom of the page has four 9 x 9 boxes lightly penciled, but the other five would be off the edge of the paper.

Now that I found the book again, I may start doodling some more... assuming I find the colored pencils.

EDIT: I replaced the image with an annotated version. The original, larger image (click on the picture) is still annotation-free.

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.