Comics scans

    In my last post I mentioned the scans of old comics at readcomiconline.li .  I originally found out about that because I follow Dick Tracy at gocomics.com .  That strip did a recent story involving a neo-Nazi terrorist scheming to detonate a big explosive at the clock tower.  In the comment section for one episode, I mentioned a similar story in a 1967 issue of Walt Disney's Comics and Stories, in which Donald Duck foiled a plot to blow up a clock tower with a big statue of Uncle Scrooge whose arms provided the hands for the clock face.  Someone else remembered it, and mentioned where you could read it at that webpage!

    I've found some other comic books there I read back at the time.  I found the 1970 comic All-Star Westerns with a reprint of "Pow-Wow Smith," about a Native American sheriff, which we had back then.  One thing I recall from it is the promos in its pages for other issues. One was for "The Outlaw," with the cover page showing a lawman's son gone bad saying "Put that gun down, Dad!  Don't make me kill you!" Another was for "Manhunter 2070" a mini-series within DC's Showcase series.  

    You know those westerns where a gunfighter comes to his father's grave to tell him "I've killed all the people who killed you"? (You don't?  Oh, well...) This cover was similar, except it was set in the space age, with the son visiting a cemetery in a mini-asteroid field!  The idea of someone being buried in a mini-asteroid got to me at the time, to the point that I skipped the rest of the comic!  For me, there was something extra-disturbing about an outer space burial...

    I've now read that "Manhunter 2070" series too.  It's about a space-age bounty hunter, with a flashback story about how he was a kid and some space pirates murdered his father and turned him into a kitchen slave, and when he got older he trained himself, waited for the right moment and killed all the pirates responsible for the murder and handed over the rest of the crew for the reward.

    For those who prefer "the Stoned Age," that webpage also has scans of Marvel's Conan the Barbarian.  I'll have to check them out too!

    On Saturday the Seniors Meetup is having another lunch, this time at Patisserie La Cignone on Danforth Avenue.  And my Classic Music Meetup will be listening to Russian music.

Sixty-three

    Yesterday was my 63rd birthday.  I bought a strawberry dream cake at Loblaw's and we ordered felafels from the place around the corner. (Prices are going up these days!)

    Through social media I heard about readcomiconline.li .  It has a lot of comic books I remember from my childhood, stuff like Donald Duck.

    I was thinking about dimensions.  With zero dimensions, you have a point.  With one, you have one segment with two points on the end.  With two, you have one square with four side segments and four corners (except that if you take the sides individually, you have a total of eight end points).  With three dimensions, you have one cube with six face squares, twelve edges (or 24 if you take the faces individually), and eight vertices (or 24 points).  So I made a table:

                            Dimensions

                  0      1        2      3        4         5

Points        1      2       4      8      16        32

(ends, corners, vertices) 

                 (1)   (2)    (8)   (24)   (64)  (160)

Segments          1        4     12     32        80   

(sides, edges)

                         (1)     (4)   (24)   (96)   (320)

Squares                       1       6      24       80

(faces)

                                   (1)    (6)   (48)  (240)

Cubes                                   1        8       40

(sub-cubes)

                                            (1)      (8)    (80)

Tesseracts                                       1       10

Super-tesseracts                                        1

How did I determine what the numbers must be for four and five dimensions?  By seeing the common patterns!  For n dimensions you have 2^n points.  A segment has 2 ends, a square has four corners, a cube has 8 corners, suggesting a linear increase (2, 4, 6, 8, 10...).  To figure out the bracketed numbers for each dimension, take the unbracketed numbers from the previous dimension and multiply by 4, then 6, then 8...  Viewing successive diagonal lines, the bracketed numbers will surpass their unbracketed counterpart by 2, then 3, then 4...

    In addition if you look at the unbracketed numbers at dimension n, their total sum will be 3^n!

    That's the sort of thing I sometimes think about when my mind is wandering...