Friday, February 08, 2008

Snoozers vs losers

A few people have written and asked for a shirt based on this strip, and actually for once I think it would make a good one! But I don't know how to express "snoozing directly correlates to losing" mathematically. I can't remember any maths at all. I can't even do matrices or vectors or simultaneous equations any more. What I hope is that in the comments to this post, someone will help me as best they can.

Thanks maths.
THATHS.

11 comments:

Unknown said...

Again the stick figure man has the advantage.

(shakes fist)

Damn youuuuuuuuu XKCD!

Er, wish I had the maths knowledge to be a little more helpful than this.

pko said...

^ losing
|.............x.........
|.......x...............
|.......................
|........x..............
|.....x.................
|....x..................
|.......................
|x......................
----------------------->
snoozing

Christian Lawson-Perfect said...

You probably want something along the lines of "the amount of losing is directly proportion to the amount of snoozing."

In LaTeX, the language of Proper Mathematicians, you might want something like
c_{losing} \propto c_{snoozing}.

Which, in real letters, is c with a subscript "losing", a proportion sign, and then another c with a subscript "snoozing".
The proportion sign is like the infinity symbol, but with the very right edge removed.

It's unicode 0221D on this page: http://www.w3.org/Math/characters/html/symbol.html

Unknown said...

Christian's comment is knowledgeable, helpful and wise, but I think pko's suggestion bags it for sheer acessability to the non-mathsnerd masses like myself.

Greg K. said...

If Wikipedia can be trusted, I think your equation would be something like:

ρ[subscript]Snoozing,Losing[/subscript] = 1

That's a Greek rho at the beginning, by the way. 1 would be the highest possible value for this correlation, and anything between 0 and 1 would show some correlation. I think it's a kind of boring looking equation. Like pko said, you might be better off with a graph. My graph (which I spent way too much time on) is here.

spugmeistress said...

it's not so much the stick figure man that has the advantage as the mathematical diagrams on index cards girl ( www.indexed.blogspot.com )

i do like the graph idea alot though :)

Graham said...

I would leave the maths behind and have just a frowning face with the slogan:

"I snoozed...

and loozed"

Grammar? That's just inconvenient.

K. M. said...

In case you're curious about what Christian's idea looks like compiled by the Software of Mathematicians:

http://www.seas.upenn.edu/~mazurak/sgrtex.png

Gene Ha said...

I think you want something like this:

www.imagezoo.com/images/ebiap/tri0062.html

But the chart should be different. The line should go up.

The left edge should be labeled SNOOZING.

The bottom edge should be labeled LOSING.

Also, the drawing shouldn't look like sepia Colorforms!

Unknown said...

Look around you.
Look around you.
Just look around you.
Have you worked out what we're looking for?
Correct, the answer is.. maths!

Unknown said...

Now the problem as I see it is that there is no context to this equation - the snoozing / losing ratio is a function applied to the activity in question such as "Rainy Sunday car boot" or "Defeat tiredness". Clearly in the second case the graph is completely inverted and tends to infinity for losing as snoozing tends to zero (minus a correction of some kind for being rendered unconscious against your will which may or may not count as losing depending on how knackered you are). I'm also disappointed to see that for some of these graphs the line fails to go through the origin, meaning that failure is almost inevitable, even for the wholly awake.
Now, please re-do this PROPERLY.