Frazz by Jef Mallett for December 13, 2024

As usual, Caulfied is over-thinking this.

I see he doesn’t have much experience with math, and none with quantum mechanics. Though that’s to be expected.

Oversimplification of reality?

If a car leaves at 8:30AM to travel 60 miles, how late will the driver be because a bunch of idiots rubbernecking at a car accident?

I think it’s because math becomes interesting when you find out what you can do with it, and it isn’t just numbers. Build things. Examine baseball statistics. Learn music theory.

Math works out but life is messy….just how it is.

Much of life is knowing which factors have an actual influence on the outcome. Less than 1/10 of 1% have ever needed a value of π more precise than 3.14 or 22/7.

Actually the answer to the whole thing is 42. Kid’s thought also might work with precision/chaos or the current political scene vs reality. Take your choice.

Caulfield needs to study mathematical precision. There is a reason that train timetable don’t list times to the second.

Who held Caulfield up high enough to write the top lines on the board?

Motivational?

The world is predictable, but not precisely.

The most math I ever used in real life was with a dial indicator to check the depth of the groove I cut onto a cylinder head to fit Fel-Pro Wire Ring Cylinder Head Gaskets for turbo charged/supercharged engines and those with Nitrous Oxyde. Engines under extreme pressure tend to go Kaboom. I made more money doing the machine work than what I made on my real job. This was decades ago, now you can buy racing cylinder heads with the grooves already set.

Have we known all along that Caulfield is left-handed, or was that just the way it was necessary to depict him vis-a-vis the blackboard? And do schools really still have blackboards? I thot they’d all gone to erasable whiteboards.

Wonder if Mrs. Olsen ever assigned the book MATH CURSE for the class?