Every so often we see, or are sent, a comic that has something awry in its setup or presuppositions, and are tempted to run as a CIDU because “I don’t understand how we can proceed from a faulty premise” or something like that. But then on the other hand we, on principle, aren’t here to condemn and cast out any cartoonist or their work.
So, as an outlet for the first impulse, here are some collected examples, of cartoons from sources one certainly respects highly, but contain boners that just demand to be called out.
This is actually pretty funny … once you get past the multiple problems in the setup and the text giving the premise.
But this seems to depend on fission being more dramatically explosive than fusion.
Except there are no imaginary numbers involved!
Okay, it’s no doubt just a typo, but maybe today there isn’t a pass for that. The issue is that Argon is almost exclusively encountered as a gas, never an oil. But there is something called argan oil, currently a popular component of skin and hair products.
The error here is probably noticeable only to someone familiar with the workings of USPS local operations in urban localities. A collection box is the more commonly seen, the mostly blue boxes we call just “a mailbox”, with some kind of opening where anyone can slide in a letter. They will contain mail for anyplace on earth, or anyhow in the USA, and certainly not limited to local destinations. There’s no way the buskids could deliver all that.
The joke could perhaps be saved by making it a [postal] relay box. These are the somewhat larger boxes, in a khaki-green, with no public deposit latch, only a side door with a lock. When a local delivery carrier with a bike or pushcart sets out from the station to begin their route for the day, it would be awkward to have to carry all the mail for the whole route. So it gets broken into two or three stages, and a truck from the station goes around to the relay boxes in the area and drops off the packets for the later stages of the routes being serviced by bike or hand-cart carriers. If the bus in our cartoon had knocked over one of these, the buskids could plausibly have delivered them. (You don’t need to know the route — just “follow the mail”.)
Comics I Don't Understand 
I remember being confused by the Loose Parts when it was published. I think showing the sheet music looking like ants, not just a partly-concealed anteater, would have made it clear.
Perhaps that (entirely real, integer) “billion” is aspiring to become so large that it would become effectively “imaginary” (at least in terms of real-world economics). Unfortunately, in terms of the current national debt, that would require about five or six additional orders of magnitude. A simpler solution would have been to use the word “inspirational” in the caption.
P.S. I thought fission cuisine worked just fine back in August. There’s nothing in the drawing or the caption that implies or requires fission to be more powerful than fusion, it’s simply a different kind of cuisine, which happens to go “boom!“, earning justified distaste from this diner. We have no idea what he thinks of “fusion” cuisine.
Not only is it not imaginary, it’s simply a factorial!
I agree with chip, it’s a billion factorial, not just an exclaimed billion. But of course in either case a very real integer.
And it seemed to me that it’s already pretty clear (and funny) that the anteater had been mistaking the notes on the score for ants.
But in that same cartoon there is something very off about “Mozart’s Rhapsody for piano and anteater”. Even leaving aside whether Mozart is a good choice for ascribing a Rhapsody to, titles / descriptors mention instruments but not nature of performers. So “Sonata for piano and clarinet” but not “Sonata for piano and human”! (Though I guess vocal range gets used as a noun, and “Song for Soprano and piano” does seem to mention a person.)
Furthermore, the comma after “PIANO” throws it off.
Actually, the neighborhood groups mail boxes are called cluster boxes. That’s probably what the school bus knocked over.
Chip, Now you have me wondering about “Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta”. Was the title originally given in English? It dates from 1936 and it seems Bartok was still in Hungary at that time, but could have used English. Anyway, it nowadays seems to be always cited without a second comma.
Lord F, thanks for the info on “cluster boxes”. I’m familiar with the installations themselves, but did not know the name. Of course, they are distinct from the “relay boxes” I mentioned. But I agree, the story of the bus collision and the students delivering the mail works out almost plausibly with a cluster box, where it just does not with a collection box as in the cartoon (nor my earlier suggestion of a relay box). With a cluster box the mail pieces would all be going locally.
A related idea to Loose Parts: Have a composition for “wind ensemble” be many loose sheets of composition blown into a random order by a stiff breeze.
@DannyBoy says:
“I agree with chip, it’s a billion factorial, not just an exclaimed billion. But of course in either case a very real integer.”
All integers are reals (but not vice versa). “Real integer” is redundant.
Carl, I would venture we all already know that.
Please bear in mind that sometimes an aware redundancy can be a precaution against misunderstanding.
For instance, Do we really need to slam the folks who write “forward slash”? Wouldn’t you rather have them than the people who are set on calling that same symbol a “backslash”?
Further, someone wanting to distinguish 3i from 3.14i could reasonably call the former an “imaginary integer”. And then go on to call plain 3 a “real integer”.
3.14i leaves me…pi eyed!
If we assume that “aspirational” is the correct and intended form, is there any way that a number can become aspirated like a consonant?
P.S. @ chipchristian (3) – Excellent catch on the factorial symbol, I missed that completely.
Thank you to whichever editor explained the use of those green mail boxes. I noticed they disappeared, but didn’t know (or much care) why. I once asked a clerk in the PO what they were for, and all he would say was ‘post office stuff’.
@ Chak (14) – Those green boxes seem to come and go, depending on the neighborhood. I remember that a couple decades ago there was once a suggestion to get rid of them because of security concerns (perhaps a terrorist might hide a bomb in one of them), but I think the real reason is that they’ve turned out to be a fairly easy target for mail thieves to break into and get a whole load of ripe mail to pick over.
@deety – never mind integers, 3i is a real, not imaginary, organisation, and my mother had some shares in it that I inherited. However, it might as well be imaginary to most (I assume) of you here, who aren’t allowed even to look at the website https://www.3i.com/: “For US regulatory reasons, US Residents are not to enter this site without the express permission of 3i Group plc”.
Anybody curious can look up its Wikipedia page, not that that tells you much.
And yet you can buy 3i ADRs under the symbol TGOPY for $15 to $16 at any decent brokerage.
A billion factorial is in the range of a googolplex – not imaginary, but fanciful, so absurdly large that it makes the universe immeasurably small.
The anteater joke is the inverse of the old joke “There was a fly on my music and I played him!” Which was turned into a song by Spike Jones: https://youtu.be/xW_jT1GP5GI?si=-KHI5hMTls9X7_oi
Carl Fink (1): I’ve always called that sort of music “fly specks.” There’s a certain element of panic when a sheet is handed out with (seemingly) more black than white on it.
Danny Boy (4): “a billion factorial” would be 1,000,000,000 times 999,999,999 times 999,999,998 times 999,999,997, etc. — probably approximating the number of grains of sand in the galaxy. As for the comic, though, I’m sure that’s what the cartoonist was going for. . . . I had to laugh out loud, though, at the concept of “Mozart’s Rhapsody for piano and anteater.”
Mitch4 (7): Ah, the old Oxford comma.
Mark in Boston (19): Thank you for that link. I thought I had heard all the Spike Jones tunes, but that was new to me.
(I have hopes that the other comments I posted a few minutes ago will eventually show up)
Googology Wiki says 1 billion Factorial is 1.57637137 × 10⁸,⁵⁶⁵,⁷⁰⁵,⁵³¹
https://googology.fandom.com/wiki/Factorial
It’s aspiring to become unimaginably bigger?
Here we have a joke not on imaginary numbers but irrationals.
The green USPS boxes are called “relay boxes” per the news reports about them being broken into in NYC a few months ago. They seem to be used by the postal delivery employees to stash extra mail for nearby locations so they don’t have to carry all the mail at the same time due to the density of the buildings/mailing addresses.
Meryl, thanks for the info that they are still called “relay boxes”. That was indeed the terminology when I worked for the USPS two summers (I think 1968 and 1969) as a Temp/Sub.
The station I worked at had most carriers using bikes or hand-pushcarts, with just a few motorized. And yes, for most residential routes the full load of mail for the whole route would not fit conveniently in the basket/pouches of the bike or pushcart. So the carrier would leave the station with the first half or even just first third of their route, and the remainder would be sent out in one of the station’s trucks to be dropped off at the strategically located relay boxes.
As a summer temp/sub, along with the couple other guys in that category, we would come in later than the regular carriers (since we weren’t sorting the mail at the sorting frames), about the time the carriers were ready to hit the street. (We would work later in the afternoon, running collections from street deposit boxes.) A regular carrier had the option to fill out a form (informally known as a “beef form”, I’m not sure why) stating that because of unusually heavy mail that day, or other possibly acceptable reasons, they were requesting the supervisor to relieve them of some portion of their route that day. Any such mail would be delivered by one of the substitutes. We might be given a couple leather-strapped bunches of mail to leave the office with; but then a second route’s handoffs would be waiting for us at a designated relay box.
(Every new substitute’s question was, how do I know where to go?, and the universal answer was, Just follow the mail. The leather-bound fistfuls would have little paper slips numbering them 1, 2, 3; and the mail itself of course had addresses on it. So I didn’t have to know “Where does route 12 start, and where does it go?”. But when finishing that handoff, I did need to know what relay box to go to, and which batches to pick up there.)
One rainy day when I didn’t have rain gear, and I was not in range of any residents’ carports or overhangs, and just a little too far from the strip mall to dash over there to shelter from some increased rain … I opened a nearby relay box and crawled inside! (I did not tell the supervisor.)
A friend of mine who lives in Belgium became a letter carrier for the postal service just because he really loves dogs. He gets paid to walk around the city and make friends with every dog he sees as he delivers the mail.
Mitch 4 – Per the new In NYC they are having problems for a few months with people breaking into the relay boxes and stealing the mail in them – somehow “they” get the key which opens the boxes. Been a couple of months now I think.