Figures

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(C)Copyright 2011, C. Burke. All rights reserved.

And while they were lying there, they were figuring stuff out.

Cardinal Comics

In honor of New York's own Timothy Dolan's elevation to Cardinal, here are a few cardinal themed comics for you.

Irregular Webcomic rerun # 96

Today's (rerun of an old) Irregular Webcomic is a tad mathematical in nature.

Devil's Staircase

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(C)Copyright 2011, C. Burke. All rights reserved.

Up a steep and very narrow stairway.
It wasn't paradise. It wasn't paradise. It wasn't paradise...
But it was Valentines Day.
Happy Valentines Day

* * *

Today's comic, number 666, by the way, was both fortuitous and serendipitous. Permit me to explain.

One of the problems with having a sporadically published comic is the difficulty in planning certain comics for specific days.

A few months back, I had an idea for comic number 666, and I wrote it down so I wouldn't forget it when the time came. Well, I've checked and checked, and I can't find where I wrote it. So now I needed a new gag, and I had a deadline: the comic after comic 665.

Had I been keeping to my regular schedule of 3 updates per week, I would have reached this milestone at least a month ago, if not sooner. As it turned out, 666 would show up on Valentines Day instead. Great! How do I combine those two themes?

A little web searching and suddenly I was reading up on the Devil's Staircase.
Serendipity. Worked for me.

Toss in the romance of Dante and Beatrice, with a dash of A Chorus Line,
and BAM!, I'm done.


Enjoy!

Assignments

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(C)Copyright 2011, C. Burke. All rights reserved.

And it's cyclical. One term just ended, and another is beginning.
And nothing changes, except the names, which they forgot to put on the paper.

Groundhog Bowl

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(C)Copyright 2011, C. Burke. All rights reserved.

Sometimes I do feel like I'm doing the same thing over and over again (after all, I am a math teacher), but the hardest thing to admit when creating this strip was that Groundhog Day was actually an "old movie".

Tree Diagram

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(C)Copyright 2011, C. Burke. All rights reserved.

Name withheld to protect ... well, me, actually. I don't want to be fired or, worse, given the third-year freshmen pre-algebra class.

If You're Still Interested ...

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(C)Copyright 2011, C. Burke. All rights reserved.

Anyway, the problem posed in the previous picture had an incorrect solution. Mike inadvertantly used phi instead of phi % when solving his imaginary interest inquiry.

The actual result was a loss of about 1% of 1% of your original principal, which is better than many mutual funds performed in the past year. However, you would have picked up only an imaginary nickel, rather than a few imaginary dollars.

Special thanks to "anonymous" for running the numbers. I don't have the budget for a staff of fact checkers around here. And, oddly enough, although I managed to get the correct solution out of wolframalpha after the mistake was first pointed out to me, it took about five tries to get the equation entered correctly when I wanted to write this entry. Too many divisions and parentheses!

Oh, and ....
I meant to do that.
Yeah, that's the ticket.

If You're Interested...

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(C)Copyright 2011, C. Burke. All rights reserved.

If you're interested in a problem with four funny math 'numbers'.

To some of the guys I work with, all paper currency is imaginary dollars...

Drive-Thru

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(C)Copyright 2011, C. Burke. All rights reserved.

That is, 100%, without fail, metaphysical certitude.

Tongue Twister

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(C)Copyright 2011, C. Burke. All rights reserved.

I think a bakery run by a clam would be even more annoying.

Then and Now

It occurs to me, that they aren't too different:




Supermarionation -- Super Mario Nation?
I'd like to drive Thunderbird 2 in Mario Kart. Or maybe the Mole.