It’s like Christmas in August: this week’s Saturday falls on Wednesday.
Makes up for when Friday the 13th fell on Saturday.
I actually had to THINK for a moment . . . was garbage picked up yesterday? No, it wasn’t, so no, this isn’t REALLY Saturday. Or is this time travel to the future . . . ?
One of the running gags in “Pogo” was that Churchy (the turtle) was perpetually terrified of Friday the 13th. Virtually any time he appeared in a strip dated the 13th, he would be running for cover, complaining that “Friday the 13th falls on a Wednesday this month!” (or whatever day it was). The amazing thing was that Kelly was able to keep the gag fresh (and amusing) for several decades.
Arlo was an LOL for this old fart. Just the sort of bad joke I would make — and only expect my wife (not the kid and DiL) to get.
KIlby, I’m pretty sure the amazing thing is that Kelly was able to get paid for doing that stupid unfunny joke for decades, expending zero thought and creating zero amusement.
@ carlfink – I suppose it depends on whether you like Pogo or not. I’ve seen several strips in which Kelly re-used an old gag, knowing that it was a retread, but cracked the fourth wall just a little bit by having one of the characters in the strip complain about the age of the joke.
It’s nice that Janis gets to be the one cracking the reference-joke here!
Really? I think Walt Kelly is possibly the single greatest comic strip artist ever. Pogo was brilliant.
@ ignatzz – True, but as someone writing under the name of a character from Krazy Kat”, we have reason to assume that you may be slightly biased toward older comics. ;-)
I’m with ignatzz on this opinion. (And I don’t write under the name of any comic strip character — my nom comes from a quote by James Branch Cabell, in his definition of “gallantry” — so You Can Trust Me to Be Impartial here. And Gallant.)
carlfink, I think is definitely in the minority on this. He’s entitled to his opinion but I think we need to keep in mind “Friday the Thirteenth falls on Wednesday this month” was never the sole punchline. And it wasn’t done *every* month. It was more a verbal tic than a joke.
One thing about Pogo, unlike say Crankshaft where the *entire* punchline was a single tepid malaprop, *every* panel was infused with visual and verbal jokes and plays and humorisms that were to be taken to be simply the universal texture and not actual gags. A superstitious turtle afraid of Friday the 13th fallen on the wrong day was just one more layer of texture.
(It seems like a hell of a lot of work for something that leads to lack of appreciation to me, but Kelly was a genius and that he could [and was willing to] pull it off is all the more power to him.)
Janis cracking up at her own joke is what really makes the strip – at least, I LOLed.
Gallant? Or Goofus?
@Mitch4
“I have read that the secret of gallantry is to accept the pleasures of
life leisurely, and its inconveniences with a shrug; as well as that,
among other requisites, the gallant person will always consider the
world with a smile of toleration, and his own doings with a smile of
honest amusement, and Heaven with a smile which is not distrustful —
being thoroughly persuaded that God is kindlier than the genteel would
regard as rational.
In fine, the gallant person is a well-balanced skeptic, who
comprehends that he knows very little, and probably amounts to
somewhat less, but has the grace to keep his temper.”
— James Branch Cabell, BEYOND LIFE (1919)
That is certainly something I’d like to be . . . wonder if I can change at almost 70 years of age.
I was watching a Roadrunner cartoon. Wile E. Coyote bought something from Acme that didn’t work. Again?!
Andréa: “That is certainly something I’d like to be . . . wonder if I can change at almost 70 years of age.”
Me, too! At 73, I’m still trying to change and to learn. Every day I learn anew that cliché: the more I know the more I realize I don’t know. Back when I knew everything, I sure was dumb!
If I remember correctly, there were only certain days of the week when Friday the 13th was a problem. Wednesday, definitely. But if Friday the 13th fell on a Tuesday, nobody mentioned it or was afraid of it.
By the way, does Halloween ever happen on Friday the 13th? How about Easter? Does Halloween ever happen on Easter?
@ MiB – I’m not sure about your “days of the week theory”, but I do know that Christmas falls on October 86th.
To be clear: I’m well aware that I’m in the minority, but I always found Pogo to be at best “less annoying.” Mostly it is very annoying reading to me.
“Does Halloween ever happen on Easter?”
Only on April Fool’s Day.
Although I understand there was a movie about Halloween occurring at Christmas… didn’t see it myself, though.
As has been famously noted, OCT 31 = DEC 25
The movie to which JP referred is almost certainly Tim Burton’s “Nightmare Before Christmas“. I recently bought the DVD, but I’m waiting for one of the two holiday’s to watch it with my kids.
P.S. Ooop’s. Sorry about the apo’strophe.
We traditionally watch it in between the two holidays. If anyone’s interested, Walgreens seems to have captured the merchandising rights for NB4C; for the past several years, more and more ‘stuff’ has been appearing on their shelves. I liked it better when the movie was relatively unknown, and unmerchandised.
For those who are not of a mathematical nature, when Arthur wrote “OCT 31 = DEC 25“, what he meant was
OCT(31) = 3*8+1 == DEC(25) = 2*10+5
And for those who are not of a mathematical nature, when Kilby wrote a bunch of math, what he meant was ( ;-) )
31 in Oct(tal) (that is, base 8) is the same number as 25 is Dec(imal) (that is, base 10).
Oh, thanks for that – love Tom Lehrer . . , I was being educated right when ‘new math’ came in, so I get it. Not that I ever USED it, but still . . . it certainly helped me understand binary numbers and that helped with computer programming. Little did we know back then . . .
@ Andréa & larK – I encountered both “new math” and alternative “base” calculations in fifth grade. It all seemed perfectly logical, and I don’t recall any resistance to it from my parents (or anyone else’s). What I do remember was a prescient, although clearly erroneous prediction from the teacher, saying that at some point, we might all switch to base-12, because it was so much easier to do math in a base that had a larger number of perfect divisors. (This was in fact the reason that base-60 was used by the Babylonians, and it’s also the reason that even today, angles are still calculated on the basis of 360 degrees in a circle).
Of couse, there’s no way that “everyone” (or even “anyone”) is going to change all our math calculations to base-12 (or any other base), the archive of existing knowledge in base-10 is simply too deep. However, what did happen is that base-2 (binary) became the standard for digital electronics, and through that base-16 (and to some degree base-8) were added to the mathematical repertoir (without replacing anything).
“Of couse, there’s no way that “everyone” (or even “anyone”) is going to change all our math calculations to base-12 (or any other base), the archive of existing knowledge in base-10 is simply too deep.”
Same reason(ing), I suppose, that we couldn’t move to the metric system all those years ago.
@ Andréa – That’s certainly part of it, but the sodapop industry did manage to make the changeover (for altogether non-altruistic reasons, of course).
^^ A partial change. There are still container sizes with base units in ounces.
I will confess that as much as I love everything *else* tom Lehrer has done, “New Math” just seemed to be singing about doing math *exactly* how I learned it and in a way that makes perfect sense and not only in a way that made perfect sense, so far as I could figure the *only* way one could teach it.
I didn’t get it and I still don’t.
I also never got the huge laugh when he says “New Math is based on the idea that knowing what you are doing is more important than getting the right answer”. If you don’t know what you are doing you *can’t* get the right answer so *of course* knowing what you are doing is more important.
And if you teach subtraction you must teach to borrow. Is there any *other* way to explain borrowing other than the number in the next column represents units 10 times the what the number in your current column so you are taking 10 units from it? I suppose the language one uses so the eyes don’t glaze over matters but they only other option I see is “you just *borrow*, all right! I don’t know why and you shouldn’t either; it just works” and I guess that’s good enough for most people but… seriously? It isn’t good.
It possible that it’s just a dig at *non* New Math users that they think basic and simple concepts is somehow complicated and incompressible (“Whoa! ‘You can’t take 3 from 2; 2 is less than 3’ What the heck is *THAT* supposed to mean?!?!?”)
Woozy: I agree with the first part of your rant, but not the second part. Ie: Yes, I too was taught that way, so I have trouble understanding the other, at the time obvious, ways of doing it (apparently there were at least two, depending on your age and socio economic status), but I do get that New Math was more than just a different algorithm, but that instead of just teaching you how to do it, a lot of time was spent trying to convey concepts that don’t really help with the doing of the problem; apparently they co-opted a bunch of set theory and predicated the teaching of how to do simple arithmetic on first learning more abstract — and in many minds useless — set theory. I remember catching some of the remnants of that, because although by the time I was being taught, most of the useless cruft had been jettisoned, you could still see it in the materials and in the approach, which often times was just curtailed by the better teachers — they had basically just gone back to teaching the algorithm, albeit the new algorithm, and ignoring the fancy educational masturbatory garnishments. So I totally get the song, even if by the words I don’t seem to get it at all: right on the cusp of the change, a mathematician lampoons the new methodology. I even get that the most effective way to lampoon it is to highlight the least objectionable part of it, ie: the new algorithm, because that will be the part that is most immediately strange, new and scary to people who have a different way of doing it. He doesn’t rely solely on that thought, just uses it as a wedge to bring in the really gaga stuff, ie: doing it in base 8. I have nothing against learning different bases, teaching them, learning them, but we didn’t get to that till seventh grade, after we had the basics well in hand. I can definitely see the folly in trying to teach second graders to subtract in base 8, thinking it will help them grasp the concept more firmly, instead of just completely freaking them out and being a total waste of time if not worse. First learn to subtract, and then later, when you have a firm grasp, we’ll go back and look more deeply at the fundamental concepts.
@ woozy – The impossibility of taking 3 from 2 still exists in the earliest years of elementary school. My son had such single digit problems (I think it was in 2nd grade) in which the “correct” answer was “cannot be done”; I think the actual purpose was to get the kids to recognize relative sizes, possibly in conjunction with less than & greater than comparisons. He has since heard about negative numbers, but so far only from me, not yet from his math teacher.
I still remember how puzzling negative numbers were when I first encountered them in 4th or 5th grade. It took a while before we got used to the fact that there could be a number that simply could not exist in “real” terms. Many years later, I ran into the same level of puzzlement when I ran into imaginary numbers in college (look them up, I am not going to explain those things here).
As for carrying (or borrowing) in subtraction, watch the video in larK’s link. The shorthand forms described by Lehrer’s song, and illustrated in the animation, are precise method(s) that can be used to (quickly) reach the correct answer, without actually using the image of expanding the borrowed digit to form ten of the next lower unit. Those “by rote” methods were the standard way to do those problems before “new math” provided a better way of explaining what was actually going on.
Actually there are several good methods for teaching subtraction that don’t require borrowing. My personal favorite is subtraction by addition.
Kilby: I remember in third grade trying to convince others that there was such a thing as a negative number, and that you got one of those when you did the impossible thing of subtracting a bigger number from a smaller number. This was of course met with the standard responses to heresy we humans are so good at, so before being burned at the stake I demanded an appeal to higher authority — let’s ask a grown up if there was such a thing as negative numbers, and we just haven’t learned about them yet. Here I made the classic mistake of an inexperienced juvenile, like Steven Jay Gould before me with his bet about dinosaurs co-existing with cavemen, and agreed to consult the nearest adult, all adults being infallible and wise, and asked one of the lunch cashiers, who obviously had no more than a second grade education and denied the very possibility of the existence of negative numbers; I was forced to recant, and learned a valuable lesson that day, albeit not about math.
“Those “by rote” methods were the standard way to do those problems before “new math” provided a better way of explaining what was actually going on.”
Yes, but this is a song *satirizing* the “tens column method” over rote learning when the conceptual “tens column” method is demonstrably *far* superior to the by rote method. It has also bugged when people complain as though it is obvious that they prefer something that is clearly inferior.
Ah, i remember the set theory stuff. I actually loved it. It wasn’t really useful untill highschool algebra when we had to solve algebraic inequalities. It really helps you get multiple equations and the solution must be at least one of them vs it must be both of them to think of the solutions as sets of possible values to one case you take the intersection (what is true for both) and the other you take the union (when you combine and take all the values).
Negative numbers were not discovered (invented?) in Europe until sometime around the 18th century. Meanwhile modern accounting had been invented around 1500. It’s all done with non-negative numbers. An account has a debit side and a credit side, and to balance it you subtract the smaller from the larger and put the result on the side that had the larger number. Thus if you have an Account Receivable debit balance of ten ducats and someone pays nine you end up with a debit balance of one ducat. But then if someone gives you 3 ducats (overpaying their account), you now have 2 on the credit side (the customer has a credit balance). If you summarize the account in a single column you use red ink or put the number in parentheses to show that it’s not on the “normal” side of the account.
And that is why to this day accountants use debits and credits where we would expect positive and negative numbers.
larK, third grade is about when we start learning grown-ups aren’t what they’re cracked up to be.
@ woozy – “satirizing … when the conceptual … method is demonstrably far superior…”
Demonstrable to you and to me, who learned these methods back when we had nice pliable brains capable of accepting new knowledge. This is just another example of what started with Einstein in 1905. Relativity was demonstrably better that the previously existing “ethereal” theories, but it was not accepted by the physics “establishment” of the day, until enough new physicists had learned, tested, and verified the new theory, by that time effectively replacing the old establishment.
Lehrer’s song is “parodying” the “new” math for the amusement of his adult audience at the time. We now know that the new method works and is better, but that was far from clear to older skeptics in the mid 60’s.
Part of the controversy about math education is theory versus practical. Should we teach children how and why math works, or should we teach them how to get the right answers?
You might know the basic principles, but if you don’t know your times table you’re not likely to get the right answers.
You might know your times tables, but not know when to use them and when not to.
And, in answer to a previous comment, yes, you can get the right answer without knowing what you’re doing. I witnessed a high school student do long division to divide by ten. He got the right answer, eventually.
@Kilby, relativity was widely accepted quite quickly in the physics world. It was (as it turns out) very easy to demonstrate experimentally. Not instantly, but quickly compared to such truths as the atomic theory.
Little-recognized fact: it was Einstein who finally proved the atomic theory once and for all in the Twentieth Century.
Nothing much gets universally accepted. There are still anti-Newton cranks out there.
. . . who are also usually flat-earthers.
@ carlfink – That’s not the way we learned it in Physics 1(*). Yes, there were a number of confirming experiments in subsequent years, but we were told that there was a lot of resistance from the “old guard” types.
P.S. @ Winter Wallaby – How does that compare to the way Physics 1 was taught when you took it?
Resistance to new theories is not in itself a bad thing. We look at it from our perspective when the theory has a great track record of standing up. There’s nothing wrong with testing the mathematics and the predictive power of the new theory.
@Kilby, depends on what you mean by “quite quickly”. Yes, there was resistance. However, all relevant research in physics was using Special Relativity within, say, 20 years of its publication, and almost as quickly for General. When you compare that to, say, atomic theory or continental drift, that’s “quickly”.
Okay… but the thing is that *example* of “new math’ *wasn’t* new math at all. That was exactly how we’ve done subtraction for as long as arabic numbers have been in use. The only difference is … well, there isn’t any difference. Adults forget *why* borrowing works but if they had to explain … well, once they remember and think for several minutes just why it works they would do the *exact* same explanation. It’s the only possible explanation there is.
So we are basically laughing at the idea of actually trying to understand something. I mean we could make a song about how turning a key makes a combustible engine run and we may laugh at how complicated and mind numbingly detailed every step gets when for most of us it is good enough to say “Put the key in and turn it and step on the gas.” But no-one would think understanding how it worked was a wasted effort or that not knowing (as must of us don’t) is *better* than knowing. That’d be absurd.
And to my mind offensively ignorant.
@woozy — ” how turning a key makes a combustible engine run” — the key hits the hamster in the ass, and causes it to start running on its wheel, right?
Kilby: I don’t think I attended more than two Physics 1 lectures, so I don’t know what was taught there regarding the history of SR.
I did attend the class from Dr. Goodstein that covered history and ethics of science, and we discussed Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions. I do remember being taught some general skepticism about the Kuhnian idea that scientific revolutions always have to overcome concerted resistance from an old guard. I don’t recall specifically what was said about special relativity, and I don’t remember enough about the history to have strong feelings about whether the rate of acceptance was too fast or too slow.
I will echo Brian a little and say that I’m not sure about your statement that relatively was “demonstrably” better than ethereal theories in 1905. Of course, in hindsight, it’s clearly better. But the ether was part of a whole self-consistent framework of physics that worked well for lots of other things. Putting myself in the shoes of a 1905 scientist, it seems reasonable to be resistant to changing that framework, and demand that a new framework is not just going to explain one or two anomalous experiments, but instead throw a lot of challenges at it, and see if it can hold up as well as an already well-tested framework. As I said, though, I’m not expressing an opinion on whether an “old guard” was resistance too long, or just the right amount of time.
Continental drift was an interesting case. The concept wasn’t terribly novel. Almost anyone who’s looked at a globe thought that the Americas and Africa looked like they might fit together. The problem was that no one had come up with a mechanism for how the drift was happening. It wasn’t until the further development of plate tectonics, based on seafloor observations of the mid-Atlantic ridge, was made.
Brian in STL: If the early arguments of continental drift were based solely on the shapes of the continents, I would think the continued skepticism was reasonable. But there were also a lot of otherwise incomprehensible fits of fossil regions. For me, continental drift falls into the “old guard held out unreasonably long” category.
Speaking of drift – this is one of the strongest cases of topic drift I can think of, and looking back to the root cause, it’s all based on the post appearing on the wrong date. :)
@ Winter Wallaby – When I said “demonstrably better”, I meant in context of the hindsight you mentioned, therefore “eventually”, rather than “immediately”. However, even if the “ether” theories had a certain amount of inner logic to them, they had already been severely (and ultimately fatally) punctured by the negative results of the Michelson-Morely experiments.
I remember reading an essay that proposed repeating the Michelson-Morely experiment on the moon (as the ultimate nail in “ether’s” coffin, not to mention “Ptolemaic geocentrism”). I was not able to find evidence that this was actually done by any of the Apollo missions, but I quit looking when I noticed that one of the links I had discovered was about to lead to the flat-earth society. There are limits.
P.S. Topic drift is often engendered by comics at the top of the post that aren’t really worth discussing.
P.P.S. If you were able to pass that course with just two visits to the lecture hall, you must be a lot better at physics than I am.
Kilby: The Michelson-Morley experiments contradicted the ether theories, and thus classical physics. But there are often (always?) well-done experiments that contradict standard theories. You don’t necessarily want to overturn a large body of knowledge that’s working well on the basis of one experiment (or even a series of experiments), even if you can’t explain them away either.
I’m more a visual learner, than auditory, so I always learned much better sitting at home and reading a book, than going to class. Smaller classes that involved discussion and active participation were different, but I never got much out of attending large lecture classes. I typically went only to the first class of the quarter to get general information about the course.
Woozy quoth “but the thing is that *example* of “new math’ *wasn’t* new math at all. That was exactly how we’ve done subtraction for as long as arabic numbers have been in use.”
As Chak pointed out earlier in the thread, there are many ways of doing subtraction without borrowing. You might be arguing that fundamentally, in the arabic number system, all methods are conceptually doing what this algorithm does explicitly — but that doesn’t mean that this particular algorithm is the one and only way to do subtraction. Yes, it might hew more closely to the underlying principles of the arabic numbering system, but you are confusing specific implementation with underlying concept. There have been many implementations of algorithms that work just fine (the song references at least one), and in fact there are algorithms to do subtraction that don’t even rely on the arabic number system — Romans were able to do arithmetic without the arabic numbering system; Merchants making change probably use an algorithm that doesn’t require understanding of the arabic numbering system. In fact, many people advocate such a system as easier than the “complicated” system of borrowing and keeping track of what you borrowed, and having to write down the numbers. ( https://www.businessinsider.com/how-common-core-subtraction-works-2014-5 ) Yes, we have come full circle.
L. Ron Hubbard in his book Battlefield Earth had the evil invaders have a base-13 numbering system; when he wasn’t taking cheap shots at psychology, he was taking cheap shots at the inferiority of base-13, not realizing that what he really was taking cheap-shots at was his lack of understanding of the arabic number system. While I will grant that 13 is a slightly worse base than 10, 10 is by no means the ideal base either, with 16 and 12 jumping immediately to mind as better. But the thing is, it’s not the base, it’s the system that matters, and as long as the evil aliens used a similar system, the fact that their base is 13 would in no meaningful way impede them (as L. Ron implied in his narrative): 1 would be 1, 10 would be 13, and 100 would be 13 13s, and you could just as easily manipulate your groups of 13 as we manipulate our groups of 10s, and there is nothing magical about the number 10, and our being “lucky” to have evolved with 10 fingers, vs. the evil aliens having “unfortunately” evolved with 13 fingers (really!) would not bestow upon the humans an advantage allowing them to mathmaticate circles around the evil aliens. It seems obviously clear to me that L. Ron was not able to separate the representation “10” from the number ten, and therefor associated all the goodness of the abstract numbering system with the literal representation of the number ten that he seemed to be intrinsically unable to disassociate from the notation “10”. I wonder if there’s anything in Scientology about other bases being evil? Does he rant about computers being evil for using binary? I shudder to think what he would make of the idea that Oct 31 = Dec 25….
Certainly there was a good deal of evidence on the side of drift. Part of the problem was that drift proponents, particularly Wegner, had movement rates that turned out to be far higher than later calculations. Again, the main problem was how these continents were moving around the thick crust of the Earth.
Comics I Don't Understand 
It’s like Christmas in August: this week’s Saturday falls on Wednesday.
Makes up for when Friday the 13th fell on Saturday.
I actually had to THINK for a moment . . . was garbage picked up yesterday? No, it wasn’t, so no, this isn’t REALLY Saturday. Or is this time travel to the future . . . ?
One of the running gags in “Pogo” was that Churchy (the turtle) was perpetually terrified of Friday the 13th. Virtually any time he appeared in a strip dated the 13th, he would be running for cover, complaining that “Friday the 13th falls on a Wednesday this month!” (or whatever day it was). The amazing thing was that Kelly was able to keep the gag fresh (and amusing) for several decades.
Arlo was an LOL for this old fart. Just the sort of bad joke I would make — and only expect my wife (not the kid and DiL) to get.
KIlby, I’m pretty sure the amazing thing is that Kelly was able to get paid for doing that stupid unfunny joke for decades, expending zero thought and creating zero amusement.
@ carlfink – I suppose it depends on whether you like Pogo or not. I’ve seen several strips in which Kelly re-used an old gag, knowing that it was a retread, but cracked the fourth wall just a little bit by having one of the characters in the strip complain about the age of the joke.
It’s nice that Janis gets to be the one cracking the reference-joke here!
Really? I think Walt Kelly is possibly the single greatest comic strip artist ever. Pogo was brilliant.
@ ignatzz – True, but as someone writing under the name of a character from Krazy Kat”, we have reason to assume that you may be slightly biased toward older comics. ;-)
I’m with ignatzz on this opinion. (And I don’t write under the name of any comic strip character — my nom comes from a quote by James Branch Cabell, in his definition of “gallantry” — so You Can Trust Me to Be Impartial here. And Gallant.)
carlfink, I think is definitely in the minority on this. He’s entitled to his opinion but I think we need to keep in mind “Friday the Thirteenth falls on Wednesday this month” was never the sole punchline. And it wasn’t done *every* month. It was more a verbal tic than a joke.
One thing about Pogo, unlike say Crankshaft where the *entire* punchline was a single tepid malaprop, *every* panel was infused with visual and verbal jokes and plays and humorisms that were to be taken to be simply the universal texture and not actual gags. A superstitious turtle afraid of Friday the 13th fallen on the wrong day was just one more layer of texture.
(It seems like a hell of a lot of work for something that leads to lack of appreciation to me, but Kelly was a genius and that he could [and was willing to] pull it off is all the more power to him.)
Janis cracking up at her own joke is what really makes the strip – at least, I LOLed.
Gallant? Or Goofus?
@Mitch4
“I have read that the secret of gallantry is to accept the pleasures of
life leisurely, and its inconveniences with a shrug; as well as that,
among other requisites, the gallant person will always consider the
world with a smile of toleration, and his own doings with a smile of
honest amusement, and Heaven with a smile which is not distrustful —
being thoroughly persuaded that God is kindlier than the genteel would
regard as rational.
In fine, the gallant person is a well-balanced skeptic, who
comprehends that he knows very little, and probably amounts to
somewhat less, but has the grace to keep his temper.”
— James Branch Cabell, BEYOND LIFE (1919)
That is certainly something I’d like to be . . . wonder if I can change at almost 70 years of age.
I was watching a Roadrunner cartoon. Wile E. Coyote bought something from Acme that didn’t work. Again?!
Andréa: “That is certainly something I’d like to be . . . wonder if I can change at almost 70 years of age.”
Me, too! At 73, I’m still trying to change and to learn. Every day I learn anew that cliché: the more I know the more I realize I don’t know. Back when I knew everything, I sure was dumb!
If I remember correctly, there were only certain days of the week when Friday the 13th was a problem. Wednesday, definitely. But if Friday the 13th fell on a Tuesday, nobody mentioned it or was afraid of it.
By the way, does Halloween ever happen on Friday the 13th? How about Easter? Does Halloween ever happen on Easter?
@ MiB – I’m not sure about your “days of the week theory”, but I do know that Christmas falls on October 86th.
To be clear: I’m well aware that I’m in the minority, but I always found Pogo to be at best “less annoying.” Mostly it is very annoying reading to me.
“Does Halloween ever happen on Easter?”
Only on April Fool’s Day.
Although I understand there was a movie about Halloween occurring at Christmas… didn’t see it myself, though.
As has been famously noted, OCT 31 = DEC 25
The movie to which JP referred is almost certainly Tim Burton’s “Nightmare Before Christmas“. I recently bought the DVD, but I’m waiting for one of the two holiday’s to watch it with my kids.
P.S. Ooop’s. Sorry about the apo’strophe.
We traditionally watch it in between the two holidays. If anyone’s interested, Walgreens seems to have captured the merchandising rights for NB4C; for the past several years, more and more ‘stuff’ has been appearing on their shelves. I liked it better when the movie was relatively unknown, and unmerchandised.
For those who are not of a mathematical nature, when Arthur wrote “OCT 31 = DEC 25“, what he meant was
And for those who are not of a mathematical nature, when Kilby wrote a bunch of math, what he meant was ( ;-) )
31 in Oct(tal) (that is, base 8) is the same number as 25 is Dec(imal) (that is, base 10).
Oh, thanks for that – love Tom Lehrer . . , I was being educated right when ‘new math’ came in, so I get it. Not that I ever USED it, but still . . . it certainly helped me understand binary numbers and that helped with computer programming. Little did we know back then . . .
@ Andréa & larK – I encountered both “new math” and alternative “base” calculations in fifth grade. It all seemed perfectly logical, and I don’t recall any resistance to it from my parents (or anyone else’s). What I do remember was a prescient, although clearly erroneous prediction from the teacher, saying that at some point, we might all switch to base-12, because it was so much easier to do math in a base that had a larger number of perfect divisors. (This was in fact the reason that base-60 was used by the Babylonians, and it’s also the reason that even today, angles are still calculated on the basis of 360 degrees in a circle).
Of couse, there’s no way that “everyone” (or even “anyone”) is going to change all our math calculations to base-12 (or any other base), the archive of existing knowledge in base-10 is simply too deep. However, what did happen is that base-2 (binary) became the standard for digital electronics, and through that base-16 (and to some degree base-8) were added to the mathematical repertoir (without replacing anything).
“Of couse, there’s no way that “everyone” (or even “anyone”) is going to change all our math calculations to base-12 (or any other base), the archive of existing knowledge in base-10 is simply too deep.”
Same reason(ing), I suppose, that we couldn’t move to the metric system all those years ago.
@ Andréa – That’s certainly part of it, but the sodapop industry did manage to make the changeover (for altogether non-altruistic reasons, of course).
^^ A partial change. There are still container sizes with base units in ounces.
I will confess that as much as I love everything *else* tom Lehrer has done, “New Math” just seemed to be singing about doing math *exactly* how I learned it and in a way that makes perfect sense and not only in a way that made perfect sense, so far as I could figure the *only* way one could teach it.
I didn’t get it and I still don’t.
I also never got the huge laugh when he says “New Math is based on the idea that knowing what you are doing is more important than getting the right answer”. If you don’t know what you are doing you *can’t* get the right answer so *of course* knowing what you are doing is more important.
And if you teach subtraction you must teach to borrow. Is there any *other* way to explain borrowing other than the number in the next column represents units 10 times the what the number in your current column so you are taking 10 units from it? I suppose the language one uses so the eyes don’t glaze over matters but they only other option I see is “you just *borrow*, all right! I don’t know why and you shouldn’t either; it just works” and I guess that’s good enough for most people but… seriously? It isn’t good.
It possible that it’s just a dig at *non* New Math users that they think basic and simple concepts is somehow complicated and incompressible (“Whoa! ‘You can’t take 3 from 2; 2 is less than 3’ What the heck is *THAT* supposed to mean?!?!?”)
Woozy: I agree with the first part of your rant, but not the second part. Ie: Yes, I too was taught that way, so I have trouble understanding the other, at the time obvious, ways of doing it (apparently there were at least two, depending on your age and socio economic status), but I do get that New Math was more than just a different algorithm, but that instead of just teaching you how to do it, a lot of time was spent trying to convey concepts that don’t really help with the doing of the problem; apparently they co-opted a bunch of set theory and predicated the teaching of how to do simple arithmetic on first learning more abstract — and in many minds useless — set theory. I remember catching some of the remnants of that, because although by the time I was being taught, most of the useless cruft had been jettisoned, you could still see it in the materials and in the approach, which often times was just curtailed by the better teachers — they had basically just gone back to teaching the algorithm, albeit the new algorithm, and ignoring the fancy educational masturbatory garnishments. So I totally get the song, even if by the words I don’t seem to get it at all: right on the cusp of the change, a mathematician lampoons the new methodology. I even get that the most effective way to lampoon it is to highlight the least objectionable part of it, ie: the new algorithm, because that will be the part that is most immediately strange, new and scary to people who have a different way of doing it. He doesn’t rely solely on that thought, just uses it as a wedge to bring in the really gaga stuff, ie: doing it in base 8. I have nothing against learning different bases, teaching them, learning them, but we didn’t get to that till seventh grade, after we had the basics well in hand. I can definitely see the folly in trying to teach second graders to subtract in base 8, thinking it will help them grasp the concept more firmly, instead of just completely freaking them out and being a total waste of time if not worse. First learn to subtract, and then later, when you have a firm grasp, we’ll go back and look more deeply at the fundamental concepts.
@ woozy – The impossibility of taking 3 from 2 still exists in the earliest years of elementary school. My son had such single digit problems (I think it was in 2nd grade) in which the “correct” answer was “cannot be done”; I think the actual purpose was to get the kids to recognize relative sizes, possibly in conjunction with less than & greater than comparisons. He has since heard about negative numbers, but so far only from me, not yet from his math teacher.
I still remember how puzzling negative numbers were when I first encountered them in 4th or 5th grade. It took a while before we got used to the fact that there could be a number that simply could not exist in “real” terms. Many years later, I ran into the same level of puzzlement when I ran into imaginary numbers in college (look them up, I am not going to explain those things here).
As for carrying (or borrowing) in subtraction, watch the video in larK’s link. The shorthand forms described by Lehrer’s song, and illustrated in the animation, are precise method(s) that can be used to (quickly) reach the correct answer, without actually using the image of expanding the borrowed digit to form ten of the next lower unit. Those “by rote” methods were the standard way to do those problems before “new math” provided a better way of explaining what was actually going on.
Actually there are several good methods for teaching subtraction that don’t require borrowing. My personal favorite is subtraction by addition.
Kilby: I remember in third grade trying to convince others that there was such a thing as a negative number, and that you got one of those when you did the impossible thing of subtracting a bigger number from a smaller number. This was of course met with the standard responses to heresy we humans are so good at, so before being burned at the stake I demanded an appeal to higher authority — let’s ask a grown up if there was such a thing as negative numbers, and we just haven’t learned about them yet. Here I made the classic mistake of an inexperienced juvenile, like Steven Jay Gould before me with his bet about dinosaurs co-existing with cavemen, and agreed to consult the nearest adult, all adults being infallible and wise, and asked one of the lunch cashiers, who obviously had no more than a second grade education and denied the very possibility of the existence of negative numbers; I was forced to recant, and learned a valuable lesson that day, albeit not about math.
“Those “by rote” methods were the standard way to do those problems before “new math” provided a better way of explaining what was actually going on.”
Yes, but this is a song *satirizing* the “tens column method” over rote learning when the conceptual “tens column” method is demonstrably *far* superior to the by rote method. It has also bugged when people complain as though it is obvious that they prefer something that is clearly inferior.
Ah, i remember the set theory stuff. I actually loved it. It wasn’t really useful untill highschool algebra when we had to solve algebraic inequalities. It really helps you get multiple equations and the solution must be at least one of them vs it must be both of them to think of the solutions as sets of possible values to one case you take the intersection (what is true for both) and the other you take the union (when you combine and take all the values).
Negative numbers were not discovered (invented?) in Europe until sometime around the 18th century. Meanwhile modern accounting had been invented around 1500. It’s all done with non-negative numbers. An account has a debit side and a credit side, and to balance it you subtract the smaller from the larger and put the result on the side that had the larger number. Thus if you have an Account Receivable debit balance of ten ducats and someone pays nine you end up with a debit balance of one ducat. But then if someone gives you 3 ducats (overpaying their account), you now have 2 on the credit side (the customer has a credit balance). If you summarize the account in a single column you use red ink or put the number in parentheses to show that it’s not on the “normal” side of the account.
And that is why to this day accountants use debits and credits where we would expect positive and negative numbers.
larK, third grade is about when we start learning grown-ups aren’t what they’re cracked up to be.
@ woozy – “satirizing … when the conceptual … method is demonstrably far superior…”
Demonstrable to you and to me, who learned these methods back when we had nice pliable brains capable of accepting new knowledge. This is just another example of what started with Einstein in 1905. Relativity was demonstrably better that the previously existing “ethereal” theories, but it was not accepted by the physics “establishment” of the day, until enough new physicists had learned, tested, and verified the new theory, by that time effectively replacing the old establishment.
Lehrer’s song is “parodying” the “new” math for the amusement of his adult audience at the time. We now know that the new method works and is better, but that was far from clear to older skeptics in the mid 60’s.
Part of the controversy about math education is theory versus practical. Should we teach children how and why math works, or should we teach them how to get the right answers?
You might know the basic principles, but if you don’t know your times table you’re not likely to get the right answers.
You might know your times tables, but not know when to use them and when not to.
And, in answer to a previous comment, yes, you can get the right answer without knowing what you’re doing. I witnessed a high school student do long division to divide by ten. He got the right answer, eventually.
@Kilby, relativity was widely accepted quite quickly in the physics world. It was (as it turns out) very easy to demonstrate experimentally. Not instantly, but quickly compared to such truths as the atomic theory.
Little-recognized fact: it was Einstein who finally proved the atomic theory once and for all in the Twentieth Century.
Nothing much gets universally accepted. There are still anti-Newton cranks out there.
. . . who are also usually flat-earthers.
@ carlfink – That’s not the way we learned it in Physics 1(*). Yes, there were a number of confirming experiments in subsequent years, but we were told that there was a lot of resistance from the “old guard” types.
P.S. @ Winter Wallaby – How does that compare to the way Physics 1 was taught when you took it?
Resistance to new theories is not in itself a bad thing. We look at it from our perspective when the theory has a great track record of standing up. There’s nothing wrong with testing the mathematics and the predictive power of the new theory.
@Kilby, depends on what you mean by “quite quickly”. Yes, there was resistance. However, all relevant research in physics was using Special Relativity within, say, 20 years of its publication, and almost as quickly for General. When you compare that to, say, atomic theory or continental drift, that’s “quickly”.
Okay… but the thing is that *example* of “new math’ *wasn’t* new math at all. That was exactly how we’ve done subtraction for as long as arabic numbers have been in use. The only difference is … well, there isn’t any difference. Adults forget *why* borrowing works but if they had to explain … well, once they remember and think for several minutes just why it works they would do the *exact* same explanation. It’s the only possible explanation there is.
So we are basically laughing at the idea of actually trying to understand something. I mean we could make a song about how turning a key makes a combustible engine run and we may laugh at how complicated and mind numbingly detailed every step gets when for most of us it is good enough to say “Put the key in and turn it and step on the gas.” But no-one would think understanding how it worked was a wasted effort or that not knowing (as must of us don’t) is *better* than knowing. That’d be absurd.
And to my mind offensively ignorant.
@woozy — ” how turning a key makes a combustible engine run” — the key hits the hamster in the ass, and causes it to start running on its wheel, right?
Kilby: I don’t think I attended more than two Physics 1 lectures, so I don’t know what was taught there regarding the history of SR.
I did attend the class from Dr. Goodstein that covered history and ethics of science, and we discussed Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions. I do remember being taught some general skepticism about the Kuhnian idea that scientific revolutions always have to overcome concerted resistance from an old guard. I don’t recall specifically what was said about special relativity, and I don’t remember enough about the history to have strong feelings about whether the rate of acceptance was too fast or too slow.
I will echo Brian a little and say that I’m not sure about your statement that relatively was “demonstrably” better than ethereal theories in 1905. Of course, in hindsight, it’s clearly better. But the ether was part of a whole self-consistent framework of physics that worked well for lots of other things. Putting myself in the shoes of a 1905 scientist, it seems reasonable to be resistant to changing that framework, and demand that a new framework is not just going to explain one or two anomalous experiments, but instead throw a lot of challenges at it, and see if it can hold up as well as an already well-tested framework. As I said, though, I’m not expressing an opinion on whether an “old guard” was resistance too long, or just the right amount of time.
Continental drift was an interesting case. The concept wasn’t terribly novel. Almost anyone who’s looked at a globe thought that the Americas and Africa looked like they might fit together. The problem was that no one had come up with a mechanism for how the drift was happening. It wasn’t until the further development of plate tectonics, based on seafloor observations of the mid-Atlantic ridge, was made.
Brian in STL: If the early arguments of continental drift were based solely on the shapes of the continents, I would think the continued skepticism was reasonable. But there were also a lot of otherwise incomprehensible fits of fossil regions. For me, continental drift falls into the “old guard held out unreasonably long” category.
Speaking of drift – this is one of the strongest cases of topic drift I can think of, and looking back to the root cause, it’s all based on the post appearing on the wrong date. :)
@ Winter Wallaby – When I said “demonstrably better”, I meant in context of the hindsight you mentioned, therefore “eventually”, rather than “immediately”. However, even if the “ether” theories had a certain amount of inner logic to them, they had already been severely (and ultimately fatally) punctured by the negative results of the Michelson-Morely experiments.
I remember reading an essay that proposed repeating the Michelson-Morely experiment on the moon (as the ultimate nail in “ether’s” coffin, not to mention “Ptolemaic geocentrism”). I was not able to find evidence that this was actually done by any of the Apollo missions, but I quit looking when I noticed that one of the links I had discovered was about to lead to the flat-earth society. There are limits.
P.S. Topic drift is often engendered by comics at the top of the post that aren’t really worth discussing.
P.P.S. If you were able to pass that course with just two visits to the lecture hall, you must be a lot better at physics than I am.
Kilby: The Michelson-Morley experiments contradicted the ether theories, and thus classical physics. But there are often (always?) well-done experiments that contradict standard theories. You don’t necessarily want to overturn a large body of knowledge that’s working well on the basis of one experiment (or even a series of experiments), even if you can’t explain them away either.
I’m more a visual learner, than auditory, so I always learned much better sitting at home and reading a book, than going to class. Smaller classes that involved discussion and active participation were different, but I never got much out of attending large lecture classes. I typically went only to the first class of the quarter to get general information about the course.
Woozy quoth “but the thing is that *example* of “new math’ *wasn’t* new math at all. That was exactly how we’ve done subtraction for as long as arabic numbers have been in use.”
As Chak pointed out earlier in the thread, there are many ways of doing subtraction without borrowing. You might be arguing that fundamentally, in the arabic number system, all methods are conceptually doing what this algorithm does explicitly — but that doesn’t mean that this particular algorithm is the one and only way to do subtraction. Yes, it might hew more closely to the underlying principles of the arabic numbering system, but you are confusing specific implementation with underlying concept. There have been many implementations of algorithms that work just fine (the song references at least one), and in fact there are algorithms to do subtraction that don’t even rely on the arabic number system — Romans were able to do arithmetic without the arabic numbering system; Merchants making change probably use an algorithm that doesn’t require understanding of the arabic numbering system. In fact, many people advocate such a system as easier than the “complicated” system of borrowing and keeping track of what you borrowed, and having to write down the numbers. ( https://www.businessinsider.com/how-common-core-subtraction-works-2014-5 ) Yes, we have come full circle.
To bring this back to a more comics centered discussion:
( https://www.gocomics.com/peanuts/2012/10/02 )
L. Ron Hubbard in his book Battlefield Earth had the evil invaders have a base-13 numbering system; when he wasn’t taking cheap shots at psychology, he was taking cheap shots at the inferiority of base-13, not realizing that what he really was taking cheap-shots at was his lack of understanding of the arabic number system. While I will grant that 13 is a slightly worse base than 10, 10 is by no means the ideal base either, with 16 and 12 jumping immediately to mind as better. But the thing is, it’s not the base, it’s the system that matters, and as long as the evil aliens used a similar system, the fact that their base is 13 would in no meaningful way impede them (as L. Ron implied in his narrative): 1 would be 1, 10 would be 13, and 100 would be 13 13s, and you could just as easily manipulate your groups of 13 as we manipulate our groups of 10s, and there is nothing magical about the number 10, and our being “lucky” to have evolved with 10 fingers, vs. the evil aliens having “unfortunately” evolved with 13 fingers (really!) would not bestow upon the humans an advantage allowing them to mathmaticate circles around the evil aliens. It seems obviously clear to me that L. Ron was not able to separate the representation “10” from the number ten, and therefor associated all the goodness of the abstract numbering system with the literal representation of the number ten that he seemed to be intrinsically unable to disassociate from the notation “10”. I wonder if there’s anything in Scientology about other bases being evil? Does he rant about computers being evil for using binary? I shudder to think what he would make of the idea that Oct 31 = Dec 25….
Certainly there was a good deal of evidence on the side of drift. Part of the problem was that drift proponents, particularly Wegner, had movement rates that turned out to be far higher than later calculations. Again, the main problem was how these continents were moving around the thick crust of the Earth.