Let’s pause here for my endorsement of Google Reader. Google Reader is my gateway to the Internet, and there’s no way I could read as much online as I do without it. If you’re unfamiliar with the concept: most websites nowadays supply feeds of their content, so you can check up on their updates without constantly visiting the site. I subscribe to 41 websites, which update on entirely different timetables with wildly differing frequencies. But whenever I go to Google Reader, all my new Internets are there for the reading. (And since it’s a Google product, the past Internets are, of course, easily searchable.) If you don’t use a RSS feed reader yet, why not? You already have a Google Reader account if you have Gmail. DO IT. I’ll wait.

Okay. Here are the 15 webcomics I am currently subscribed to (it fluctuates every month or so).

Totally awesome:

• Nedroid Picture Diary. Oh my. This is probably my favorite webcomic. Every single one is totally amazing. Stars Reginald, a bird (of some sort?), and Beartato, a bear-tato. You need to read this.
• chainsawsuit. It doesn’t really make any sense, but that’s sort of the point. The best webcomic for those of you with no attention span.
• Dinosaur Comics. Hard to explain this one. It has a fair bit of text but always hits…some sort of point…right on the head. Stars T-Rex, a pretty cool dinosaur and dude. Very excellent.
• xkcd. Yeah, it’s a great comic. Math and romance and stick figures and whatever you already read this.
• Chronillogical. It’s a webcomic about time-traveling students by my friend Greg Poulos, and his friend John Chouinard. Great art and a great story. You have to start from the beginning, but it’s not that old. Do it.
• Penny Arcade. These guys are the veterans of the webcomic industry. Unfortunately, this comic doesn’t really make sense unless you are up-to-the-day on video game news. (Maybe you should subscribe to a gaming blog!) Every comic comes with a long blog entry, and often is making fun of something announced that morning.
• Sheldon Comic Strip. If you’re feeling nostalgic, this is basically a daily newspaper comic strip that isn’t in any newspapers. One difference: unlike newspaper comics, this is actually funny. Centers around a typical 10-year-old billionaire and his talking duck.
• pictures for sad children. Funny, kind of depressing sometimes, in a funny way.
• Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal. Quite funny usually-one-panel strips with a twist caption. Quite irreverent but worth reading (just not around your parents!).

Here are the rest (which are still excellent) but I am sick of writing blurbs:

• Hark! A Vagrant. Generally about history. Pretty good even if you don’t know much about history.
• Thinkin’ Lincoln. It’s sort of about Lincoln. Used to be a lot funnier, but still pretty good.
• Gunshow. Just subscribed recently. Pretty funny.
• indexed. Funny graphs drawn on notecards.
• Buttersafe.  Reminds me a bit of pictures for sad children but more peaceful.
• Simulated Comic Product. Sometimes I wonder why I am subscribed to this. Then I remember it updates infrequently and is sort of funny.

Read away! If you have any suggestions for webcomics that I don’t subscribe to, leave them in the comments!

I’m glad all of you made it out here tonight. One great thing about math is how diverse it is–not just of mathematicians, but of the entire field itself. Math ranges from the purest, most useless subjects–the ones I like–to applied fields, like engineering; at the same time, some fields like computer science straddle the dichotomy, strangely both applied and pure at the same time.

As some of you know, I’ve recently come to like computer science a lot. I’m still learning the ropes, but it’s already pretty easy for me to find the computer scientists at a breakfast buffet. They’re usually in a queue by the hash table.

See, the choice between math and related fields is a tradeoff between purity and utility. The more applied fields actually get some important results.

For example, in computer science, they recently deduced the best way to walk: the logic gait. Of course, if you do too many logical ands, your ampersands may get inflamed, a serious condition called conjunctivitis.

In electrical engineering, they’re working on making even better semiconductors. I think adding gallium to silicon is totally dope.

In physics, they recently discovered a new salsa a thousand times better than pico de gallo. It’s called nano de gallo. And they excavated a derivative of the velociraptor: the acceleraptor.

Seriously, though. You probably saw that Wall Street Journal article about how mathematician is the best profession, since it pays well, and sitting in a chair doesn’t really have any occupational hazards.

Still, some mathematicians have gotten into entrepreneurial endeavors. I’ve been eating out lately at Markov’s chain of restaurants. They’re kind of artsy; you don’t actually get to order off a menu. They just choose your dish randomly based on the probability that you’ll like it. I highly recommend their Chinese, though. I quite enjoy their random wok.

Even the Ghostbusters have gone into math lately, studying Hilbert spaces. They’ve already made a lot of breakthroughs in spectral theory.

But Rick Astley hasn’t had as much success in game theory. He’s studying the prisoner’s dilemma, but he just can’t get past his moral hangups about ratting out the other prisoner to lessen your own sentence. Even if he knows the other prisoner won’t rat him out, Rick’s still never gonna give him up.

And ever since the economy tanked, cartesian products of rings have become more popular, since grad students can only afford to study free modules.

The military pulled out of some math research, too. At the NSA they can’t even generalize any more; they’ve been reduced to lieutenantizing. They’ve also been reconsidering some policies at their complex prisons. The problem with conjugal visits is that sometimes they result in those elements multiplying, which becomes a real problem of square magnitude.

But really, now. I’ve been making it sound like math isn’t good for anything, but that couldn’t be further from the truth.

I use calculus in the grocery store all the time. For example, how do you differentiate between cuts of beef? Prime rib.

And algebra comes in handy on the dance floor. You know the robot, right? It’s composed only of rigid motions, so it turns out it’s actually a subgroup of isometries.

And analysis is indispensable in the kitchen. The other day, I made a sequence of sandwiches for myself: first a p-naught butter and jelly sandwich, then a p1 butter and jelly sandwich, then a p2 butter and jelly sandwich… I tried to eat the whole series, but I realized the sandwiches didn’t get smaller, so I diverged from that plan.

To me, at least, math is really exciting. Seriously. I just get really excited whenever I’m doing math. Like, the other day, I had the surface integral of the curl of a vector field, and I was really stoked to turn it into a path integral instead.

One problem I’ve noticed in math classes is that there’s so much material in each class, but it isn’t compact enough to cover finitely. Good professors know that it’s easier once you add on a point at infinity; then you can always cover it finitely.

Anyway. Probably a lot of you have AT&T Wireless plans, right? They changed their name one and a half years ago or so; that’s because they realized how important linear algebra is, and they wanted to be invertible. So now they’re no longer singular.

A recent medical study found that Viagra works on some ring members with zero powers. After the trial, they were no longer nilpotent.

Anyway, I think it’s time for the next act, so I’m going to leave you with a little physics problem… (A demo ensues.)

• WTF = What the fuck. Alternatively, World Taekwondo Federation.
• FTW = For the win. Google suggests Fort Worth Meacham International Airport.
• FWT = A sucking noise made with the mouth. Also, Flimsy West-African Textiles.
• WFT = Whale Fighting Tactics. An international martial art created in AD 2101 to eradicate all whales, who turn out to be the masterminds of the illegal seizure of all your base.
• TFW = Triboluminescent Fragmentation of Wint-O-Green-Life-Savers. Shorthand for well-known effect that chomping on Wint-O-Green Life Savers in the dark makes sparks.
• TWF = Tricky War-time Fortifications. Famously used in World War I in the form of bunkers.

So I’ll admit that the above image is completely nonsensical, but it’s funnier if you recognize the context. The context, naturally, is something that could only be gleaned by spending plenty of time on the Internet.

Several years ago, somebody made a parody rap called “Bitches don’t know ’bout my dick.” In response, somebody posted this image on the Internet:

Ever since then, this picture has been endlessly Photoshopped, changing the face and words. Most notable of these parodies is the “BITCHES DONT KNOW BOUT MY DIABEETUS” picture featuring Wilford Brimley, long-time ex-actor (and guy who looks a bit like a walrus) on those Liberty Medical Supplies ads that run on random television stations occasionally. (Note also that “diabeetus” is a separate meme.)

Regarding the pylons–a famed real-time strategy computer game called StarCraft has a race called the Protoss whose buildings require energy pylons in the vicinity as power sources. Thus the “BITCHES DONT KNOW BOUT MY ADDITIONAL PYLONS” and Protoss head image which can continue to confuse everybody. If you want to really confuse somebody, go find a YouTube video about “…ADDITIONAL PYLONS” and show somebody unaware of memes and StarCraft. Hilarity ensues.

• One person reached my blog from the Google results for “how to court a christian girl.” I have verified that, in fact, I am at the moment the first of two Google results for “how to court a christian girl” (with quotes), thanks to my old post about how stupid WikiHow is.
• Except for the aforementioned man searching for a Christian girl, most people getting to my website from Google are searching for acfdb. One person searched for “matt weiner acf.” I hope they were not disappointed that my website lacks Matt Weiner.
• In fact, 67% of my traffic last month was directed at acfdb, which is a good sign, seeing as I hoped acfdb would actually be used.
• 17% of the traffic is to my blog. The remaining traffic is fairly evenly split between the other sections of my website.
• Slightly more than half of the visitors use Windows. Very few use Linux.
• My most popular non-recent blog entry (by far) is the math stand-up one.

In conclusion, my website has quizbowl resources, Christian advice, and math stand-up.

Wow, there are some great acts here. In particular, I think the basis we just heard was great. His music spanned our three-space quite nicely. Anyway, I was going to bring some predatory birds here, but then I realized it wasn’t a talon show.

Okay, I’d like to make a request of you before I start my act. Please laugh very loudly at everything I say, because nobody might actually find it funny.

So, math comedy. When I told my friends I was going to do a math stand-up act, one of them replied, “Chuck Norris knows the tangent of pi over two!” Well…okay. I’m not sure how to respond to that.

Math comedy is certainly a niche audience, though. Even among mathematicians. If you ask a statistician if they’ve heard a joke before, they say “Probably.”

Anyway, there are a lot of oldies-but-goodies. There’s the joke about the mathematician who gives a talk about 13-dimensional space. Afterwards, an engineer comes up to him and says, “Wow, how could you possibly visualize 13-dimensional space?” The mathematician responds simply, “That’s easy, I just visualize n-dimensional space, and set n equal to 13.”

Of course, many sub-disciplines come with their own occupational hazards. They say topologists can’t tell the difference between a doughnut and a coffee mug, them being homeomorphic and all. I’m not sure if that’s true; I’ll ask Kent after the show.

And then physicists get their own brand of flak from mathematicians. Physicists, you see, use a special brand of mathematics. The really fuzzy type…that’s usually wrong, but somehow comes up with the right answers all the time. I think one thing in particular illustrates physicist math. Those of you who know some physics may know that electric and magnetic waves propagate as orthogonal sinusoidal waves. The direction in which they are pointing, the vector representing the energy flux of the wave, that’s called the Poynting vector. I don’t know about you, but I never make distinctions about which of my vectors are pointing. They all are!

Anyway, the other day I was going to a geometry conference, and I was speaking on constructible diagrams. I was flying out of the airport, but I was stopped at security because of my straightedge and compass. They found my weapons of math construction. I ended up missing my plane. But it’s okay; luckily I had three points in my pocket, so I defined my own plane and got there on time.

You know, we mathematicians are always trying to prove to everyone that there’s math everywhere. In particular, there’s a lot of math in the Bible; did you know that? For example, a lost story from the gospels. One day, Jesus said, “The kingdom of heaven is like x squared plus 3x plus 5!” Somebody went up to Matthew and asked him, “What is Jesus talking about?” “Don’t worry,” responded Matthew, “that’s just another one of his parabolas.”

Then there’s also the story in Genesis with Noah’s Ark. After the ark landed, Noah told all the animals to go forth and repopulate the world. Two snakes stayed behind, and told him, “We can’t do that until you build us a wooden desk.” So, whatever, he built it, and lo and behold, they started to reproduce. He asked them what the problem was, and they said, “Well, we’re adders. We need log tables to multiply.”

The other day I was proving a theorem. It was a long theorem, with a lot of significant intermediate stages. I got to one of those stages, and I said to myself, “Do I have to finish? Lemma stop here.”

Medicine has made great strides recently. When right triangles get old, they sometimes start to sag, their right angle turns into 89 degrees, 88 degrees… Anyway, they made this injection, you can just apply it to the triangle, and the angle will snap back up to a right angle. It’s called Pythagorean serum.

The other day I was at the concession stand. I wanted a medium order of Fibonachos, and my friend wanted a small order. But then I realized that a small plus a medium cost the same as a large.

I usually eat more healthily. I found a grape that could commute, it’s called an abelian grape.

I thought up a great anagram for Banach-Tarski. Ready? It’s… “Banach-Tarski Banach-Tarski.”

Some people have wondered why Newton didn’t contribute to group theory. It’s because he wasn’t Abel.

Have you heard? A former vice president recently released some rap tapes to teach computer science. It’s called “Al Gore Rhythms.”

Even mermaids like math. They wear algae bras.

Okay, just one more and I’ll leave you guys alone. So, as you know, lately, the military has been having issues with how its officers are perceived. Some kernels have expressed concern at their rather zero-dimensional images.

Or at least, they should be, based on how many times I was tempted to use them while writing this paper. Oh well. An apparent tendency toward certain words cannot necessarily be ascribed to poor stylistic choices.

Thank you, cognitive science department of Indiana University.