I was intrigued to learn just a couple years ago that psychologists and researchers apply the term “synaesthesia” [or under other spellings] to a much wider range of experiences than the standard full-scale examples involving literally seeing colors for sounds or words.
So, it may be a weak form of synaesthesia that I can readily tell you a lot about the genders, appearance [apart from actual shape!], personality, family relations, and backstory of the letters of the alphabet, digits, and a few more small or round numbers. Whatever this counts as, I’ve known these as private facts since childhood.
Then on that authority, I can say the artist has gotten the roles and colors very mixed up! Digit 1 is male! Digit 2 is female, and I don’t know if she has been pregnant, but certainly not by 1, who is her brother!
I was going to more or less say the same thing that Mitch said. But I was going to point out you can’t tell by ultrasound if the *husband* was unfaithful. And you don’t give an ultrasound to the husband anyway.
Never thought that 1 and 2 were brother and sister though.
And 1 is male because he is pointy and red and 2 if female because she is round and blue. (Red is, of course, a masculine color and blue is feminine….)
I had that too, and let me tell you, boy did it get in the way of my doing math! I never was able to do those damn timed worksheets of a hundred simple multiplication problems in a minute that they gave us in 4th grade — by the time I was finished recognizing the digits and their interactions and relations and was able to push that aside to get to the actual answer to what their product is, I’d lost such an amount of tangible time that I knew I could never finish the quiz in time, which just added to the pressure… I actually noticed there was a subconscious voice that often actually manifested itself in my actual voice mouthing the correct answer long before I had swept all the relationship shape stuff aside, and I was often surprised that the number I had been muttering under my breath all along turned out to the the answer I was looking for.
Either way, I was very badly served by traditional teaching; I wasn’t actually bad at math (quite the opposite, really), but I was hopeless at mindless memorization (or at least the dominant part of my brain was), and so to this day I basically count on my fingers for addition, and still don’t know my times tables (but if I just blurt out a number unthinking it is usually the correct one).
I have found with age the overwhelming presence of the personality of the digits has faded, but what you describe, Mitch, is very familiar, even if I couldn’t say today what color the digits in the cartoon should have, nor what their relations are. (Though yes, those colors are wrong, but I’ve learned to not let it bother me over the years, I just ignore these things, just one more of my cultural aspect that the world I live in doesn’t understand, so don’t even engage; I had to look at the cartoon again after I read your comment and turn my filters off to go, yeah, those colors are wrong, as are the facial expressions and even the genders, but like I said, I don’t know any more what they should be…)
My sister knows the entire personality and family dynamics and childhood histories of all the colors.
I’m no-where near that pronounced but I can tell you 5’s first name starts with a hard G and likes to eat pippin apples and is green. That seems to be as far as my synesthesia goes.
Unless you accept that music in a minor scale sounds hollow, is convex, and prime whereas music in a major scale is fat, is concave, and composite as being a form of synesthesia but that’s just … obvious.
Personally, I probably would have made the husband the 1 and the wife the 2, but I don’t mind how the author rendered it that much, as the the cartoon is supposed to be absurd to begin with.
(Although I think it’s kind of neat how the cartoon is evoking a discussion about synesthesia, which I don’t think was the artist’s intent.)
Today I whispered in Mark Anderson’s ear, “LYING around.”
Actually, I SHOUTED it.
Of course things don’t add up. They’ve committed an act of multiplication.
What gets me is the very different places the arms and legs attach in the flasher pic. That’s a helluva lot of dimorphism.
For those of you who find personalities in numbers, here’s a story you might like that I first read a long time ago:
The “flasher” in the Bent Object piece could be said to be an open book.
But poor little Five. He grew up to be such an odd character.
What was the father expecting the “product” of their union to turn out like?
“What was the father expecting the ‘product’ of their union to turn out like?”
{ 1, 2 }
IF he’s orthodox.
One has both eyes on the same side of her (his?) nose, like Peppa Pig.
If that baby is head down, which may or may not be true, it is a 2 and as others have pointed out, wouldn’t add up and just be their product. So nothing fishy going on here.
Some fives can be flipped to become a two. This one is, at best, a very ugly two when flipped.
We have to make assumptions about the genetics here.
If one and two were different species then they probably could not reproduce, or at best would have an infertile child like a mule. I suppose it could be a five, just as a mule is something like a horse and something like a donkey and something like neither of them. But it certainly would not be a one or a two.
If one and two are the same species then they could be like different breeds of horses. If one and two are each purebreds then the result would be predictable, maybe a three. But perhaps one claimed to be a pure one and now the five genes are revealed and two is a racist.
Comics I Don't Understand 
I was intrigued to learn just a couple years ago that psychologists and researchers apply the term “synaesthesia” [or under other spellings] to a much wider range of experiences than the standard full-scale examples involving literally seeing colors for sounds or words.
For example
https://thepsychologist.bps.org.uk/volume-28/february-2015/surprising-world-synaesthesia#
So, it may be a weak form of synaesthesia that I can readily tell you a lot about the genders, appearance [apart from actual shape!], personality, family relations, and backstory of the letters of the alphabet, digits, and a few more small or round numbers. Whatever this counts as, I’ve known these as private facts since childhood.
Then on that authority, I can say the artist has gotten the roles and colors very mixed up! Digit 1 is male! Digit 2 is female, and I don’t know if she has been pregnant, but certainly not by 1, who is her brother!
I was going to more or less say the same thing that Mitch said. But I was going to point out you can’t tell by ultrasound if the *husband* was unfaithful. And you don’t give an ultrasound to the husband anyway.
Never thought that 1 and 2 were brother and sister though.
And 1 is male because he is pointy and red and 2 if female because she is round and blue. (Red is, of course, a masculine color and blue is feminine….)
I had that too, and let me tell you, boy did it get in the way of my doing math! I never was able to do those damn timed worksheets of a hundred simple multiplication problems in a minute that they gave us in 4th grade — by the time I was finished recognizing the digits and their interactions and relations and was able to push that aside to get to the actual answer to what their product is, I’d lost such an amount of tangible time that I knew I could never finish the quiz in time, which just added to the pressure… I actually noticed there was a subconscious voice that often actually manifested itself in my actual voice mouthing the correct answer long before I had swept all the relationship shape stuff aside, and I was often surprised that the number I had been muttering under my breath all along turned out to the the answer I was looking for.
Either way, I was very badly served by traditional teaching; I wasn’t actually bad at math (quite the opposite, really), but I was hopeless at mindless memorization (or at least the dominant part of my brain was), and so to this day I basically count on my fingers for addition, and still don’t know my times tables (but if I just blurt out a number unthinking it is usually the correct one).
I have found with age the overwhelming presence of the personality of the digits has faded, but what you describe, Mitch, is very familiar, even if I couldn’t say today what color the digits in the cartoon should have, nor what their relations are. (Though yes, those colors are wrong, but I’ve learned to not let it bother me over the years, I just ignore these things, just one more of my cultural aspect that the world I live in doesn’t understand, so don’t even engage; I had to look at the cartoon again after I read your comment and turn my filters off to go, yeah, those colors are wrong, as are the facial expressions and even the genders, but like I said, I don’t know any more what they should be…)
My sister knows the entire personality and family dynamics and childhood histories of all the colors.
I’m no-where near that pronounced but I can tell you 5’s first name starts with a hard G and likes to eat pippin apples and is green. That seems to be as far as my synesthesia goes.
Unless you accept that music in a minor scale sounds hollow, is convex, and prime whereas music in a major scale is fat, is concave, and composite as being a form of synesthesia but that’s just … obvious.
Personally, I probably would have made the husband the 1 and the wife the 2, but I don’t mind how the author rendered it that much, as the the cartoon is supposed to be absurd to begin with.
(Although I think it’s kind of neat how the cartoon is evoking a discussion about synesthesia, which I don’t think was the artist’s intent.)
Today I whispered in Mark Anderson’s ear, “LYING around.”
Actually, I SHOUTED it.
Of course things don’t add up. They’ve committed an act of multiplication.
What gets me is the very different places the arms and legs attach in the flasher pic. That’s a helluva lot of dimorphism.
For those of you who find personalities in numbers, here’s a story you might like that I first read a long time ago:
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Literary_Lapses/A,_B,_and_C
The “flasher” in the Bent Object piece could be said to be an open book.
But poor little Five. He grew up to be such an odd character.
What was the father expecting the “product” of their union to turn out like?
“What was the father expecting the ‘product’ of their union to turn out like?”
{ 1, 2 }
IF he’s orthodox.
One has both eyes on the same side of her (his?) nose, like Peppa Pig.
If that baby is head down, which may or may not be true, it is a 2 and as others have pointed out, wouldn’t add up and just be their product. So nothing fishy going on here.
Some fives can be flipped to become a two. This one is, at best, a very ugly two when flipped.
We have to make assumptions about the genetics here.
If one and two were different species then they probably could not reproduce, or at best would have an infertile child like a mule. I suppose it could be a five, just as a mule is something like a horse and something like a donkey and something like neither of them. But it certainly would not be a one or a two.
If one and two are the same species then they could be like different breeds of horses. If one and two are each purebreds then the result would be predictable, maybe a three. But perhaps one claimed to be a pure one and now the five genes are revealed and two is a racist.