Zippy feeling just a bit meta.
And a semi-CIDU for this same couple:
The question being: Is the guy just pushing his point by selecting a random term meant to be absurd, or else do they maybe have something (like a remote, or an ashtray, …) which is actually crafted to look like a Stegosaurus?
Why not start off Sunday with a bit of math? Roughly how old is she?
This is Frazz’s Sunday intro panel for January 7th. Mallett posts these on Facebook. Otherwise, I’d never see them because GoComics doesn’t use the intro panels, for reasons I don’t understand.
Comics I Don't Understand 
The stegosaurus guy is definitely mocking his counterpart there.
Jef Mallet should stop trying to be Randall Munroe.I confess that I have no idea what “a consistent portion of the mean” means in this context. Mean <i>of what</i>? Is she suggesting that a 40-year-old should celebrate once a year and that everyone else should celebrate every 1/40th of their own lifespans?If that’s what she means, then 10.5 weeks goes into 52 weeks (roughly) 5 times. So she is 1/5 as old as a 40-year-old, or 8 years old.
@Powers, I tried working it out from the other direction. If 10.5 weeks is 1/40 of her life, then her entire life to date, in weeks, is 40 * 10.5 = 420. Dividing by 52, for integer plus remainder, gives 8 years and 4 weeks as her age.
But that is still peculiar, unstable. It sounds in the comic like she will celebrate every 10.5 weeks, for the duration of this year. But since the calculation does not seem based on an integer number of years, does it change every time, not just every year? That does not strike me as “consistent” either.
I’ve noticed with “Reply All” (both versions) that the artist has consistently used different skin tones for the lead character, her partner (as in today’s examples), her therapist, and her various coworkers. But I can’t decipher the intent. Are these just different complexions, or does she intend different racial affiliations?
In the Andertoons, of course the main joke idea of the “shaving” is conventional warnings to people (largely women) of likely outcome of shaving hairs in unwanted places. But it’s nice that it also is making reference to “shaved ice” treats/desserts (so the “shaving your ice” does not come in out of the blue).
Speaking of averages:
Headline: “Most Chicago winters have produced below-average snowfall totals”
I guess that depends on the kind of average you are using …
“Most Chicago winters have produced below-average snowfall totals”
That’s true of any distribution that’s skewed right, which is common when the lower bound is zero (can’t have less than no snow) — and if the mean is used as the average.
Consider, for example, a southern city where it snowed one inch in 1920, but didn’t snow at all the other 99 years of the 20th century. The mean snowfall would be .01 inches, but 99% of the years would be below the average.
Tomorrow’s headline: “Cold weather makes puddles freeze” and eventually “Water flows downhill”.
Okay, but what if “average” is used to mean “median”?
I can’t imagine why GoComics doesn’t use the intro panels. It’s not like they’re saving ink. Maybe a few kilobytes of storage.
zbicyclist: In your example, the <i>mean</i> would be 0. The <i>average</i> would be 0.01. It does, however, show how Mitch’s headline could be true.
GoComics does not select nor decide whether to use the “throwaway” or “title” panels. The syndicate sends whatever material they want, and GoComics uses whatever they get.
@BoiseEd, by definition the mean is the arithmetic average. Same thing, two terms. Were you thinking of the modal value?
Carl, there are 3 “averages”: Mean (add all up and divide by # of entries), Median (put them in order and find the middle value), and Mode (most common value). On a skewed curve, they can be very different. But even knowing that, the headline about Chicago definitely seems odd, at least at first glance. Clearly it matters how they define “average”, and they didn’t use the most appropriate one, like in zbicyclist’s example. There the Mode or Median would be more appropriate than the Mean. And that’s probably true about the Chicago data as well.
In common parlance, “average” refers to the mean. If something like the median is meant, it will explicitly used, like “median home prices”.
From Britannica:
Mean, in mathematics, a quantity that has a value intermediate between those of the extreme members of some set.
The arithmetic mean … is defined as the sum of the numbers divided by n. The arithmetic mean (usually synonymous with average) …
So in the set [1,1,1,1,1,1,100], the mean is 1 and the average is 15.14 so the bottom line is that with one really heavy snowfall year, most years will be below average. Snowfall, though can be just plain mean!
@BoiseEd, the definition you are using in #14 is that of the median. See, oh:
https://www.khanacademy.org/math/statistics-probability/summarizing-quantitative-data/mean-median-basics/a/mean-median-and-mode-review
https://edu.gcfglobal.org/en/statistics-basic-concepts/mean-median-and-mode/1/
In fact, see the Encyclopedia Britannica: https://www.britannica.com/science/mean-median-and-mode
You’re overreading the definition you quote. As @Wendy says, “mean” is a more general word that just means “any way to find the ‘middle’ value of a set of numbers.” That’s why I used the phrase “arithmetic mean” in my previous message.
Now, let me wish this message well as it goes into purgatory, waiting to be released after its sin of containing links ….
@Kilby: The syndicate for Frazz is Andrews McMeel Syndication. GoComics is published by Andrews McMeel Universal. These are two companies under the same corporate umbrella. They ought to work together to publish all the panels of the Sunday strip.
@ Joshua (16) – I agree wholeheartedly, they should work together, but the fact is that they simply don’t. GoComics is an underfunded, understaffed, shoestring operation, which simply does not have the manpower to do anything more that the bare minimum.
Kilby’s correct, and I have communicated with the GC staff in the past. Frankly they are kept busy to the point of almost being overwhelmed by the trolls. They instituted a banned word list to help, which gets constant complaints when there is some non-offensive use of a word, which somehow the list was supposed to figure out.
I’m not sure if the WP filter would trigger, so I’ll say that a recent one on Breaking Cat News was the first four letters of “muffin”. Another one is a type of cat with “Maine” in its name.
@ Brian (18) – I suspect that the GC filter operates word-wise; I know for a fact that their search feature will not discover “partial” terms (or at least not all of them). In contrast, WP uses a substring filter, so that (for instance) the verb describing what a vacuum does will be caught and moderated, no matter whether it is used in singular or plural (with or without an -s), or in past tense (with -ed added). Thus, if “muff” were on WP’s moderation trigger list, we would have to talk about “cupcakes” instead of “muffins”.
@Kilby: This is known in the software biz as “the Scunthorpe problem”.
The GC filter doesn’t break words on hyphens so “hand-muff” is not a problem. Substring isn’t as much of a problem if the hits go to a human moderator for review, but that’s not the case for GC.
One of the odder situations is that “spice” is all right, but not “spices”. No one is really sure, because if it were for the slur against Hispanics, then you’d expect both longer forms to be okay.
I think the Barbie movie has introduced some potentially even less popular Babies, like Cellulite Barbie, Just Trying to Make it Through the Day Barbie, and Irrepressible Thoughts of Death Barbie.
It did not even occur to me that we would see the Barbie movie. To me she is something that I played with a lot when I was a child. Did not even think of taking my collection (one Barbie, one Midge, one Ken, one Skipper and similar dolls from the Littlechap family, Tammy and her sister Pepper and of unknown manufacturers) when I left home or when we took my parents house apart when it when was sold. But Robert wanted to see it and he picks the movies. Neither of us can understand the commotion over the movie – disappointing as I figured it would be.
When I got my Barbie doll I had never heard of same. It was my birthday and one of the girls invited was the daughter of an accountant my dad had worked for – they lived in NYC (not sure which borough) – so even though about the same age, she was more sophisticated than me and knew of such things.
My collection did grow – especially houses. Even then I had the idea for the difference in price buying a small doll did not make as much sense as buying a much bigger cardboard building. Add to that dad had a client who made corrugated boxes – which they figured out they could make dollhouses for 11.5 inch dolls as long as they did mention “Barbie”, so we had a couple of those dollhouses also. Also her blue (not pink as in the movie) sports car.
All was wiped out when Hurricane Sandy hit my mom’s house and for the second time since she lived there the basement flooded – only toy left usable in basement usable was a similar, much smaller doll which came along in a group of dolls when my youngest sister was of an age to play with them (she had the others also, but they did survive) – I forget the name of the dolls – but they did have a great house – I made it for her from cardboard boxes.
OMFG. Comics — hysteric-effing-ful. Comments — ?? Once a Zippy fan . . . always loving your concept here.