FoxTrot by Bill Amend for August 18, 2013

Cleanup will be about half an hour……….

Too bad! It should have said “We’re gonna need a cleanup on Aisle Three”

Okay, did anyone figure the solution without resorting to Wikipedia? I had no idea what the atomic number for Boron was (5) and couldn’t remember the number of lines in a sonnet (14).

guessed A and was right

You can actually figure out the answer without actually knowing all the variables involved and without resorting to wikipedia, look at the last 2 panels closely!

This reminds of of my high school days. We had to have a calculator for algebra class. Being from a poor family my mother had to get me the cheapest one she could find. (You can get one for $1 now days). I got accused of cheating because kids with $100 calculators were failing while I was passing with a cheap ($20) one was passing. I shut my teacher up when I started to correct his mistakes in front of the whole class which was quit often.

82, 82, 82. 246 total.

4 + 5 + 14 for those who a google challenged.

The last time those two did something like this, it involved a box full of bouncing balls, and the store went out of business because of all the injury lawsuits as a result.

Like others, I did it the logical way and saw that only A had 2 pencils. I would have guessed wrong on both Boron and sonnet because I did not care enough to do a search.

Fun to see that even brainiacs can be superstitious!

I’ve been able to remember the atomic number of boron ever since Bruce Willis was in that movie about it: The Fifth Element

Error. You don’t drop your pencils. It breaks the lead.

The square root of 16 is 4 and -4 so a better correct answer would have been 15 and 23

The choices helped me remember there are only 14 lines in a Shakespearean sonnet (I’m much, MUCH more into the plays), where some have 16 – 25 wasn’t an option.

They bought the TWO pencils that fell on the correct answer A: 23

My quirky English teacher taught us that the rhyme scheme of a sonnet ended with “GG” —“you know, like horses!”

@ K.C. Fahel Did you even get my reference?

Drop pencils like that and you have pencils that constantly break when sharpened

FlyingCar, 16^(1/2) is both -4 and 4, but sqrt(16) is 4. Roots are a function, and therefore can’t have two solutions.

I was answering a question on Yahoo! Answers math section and somebody was supposed to find the approximate values of various square roots using a method of guessing and testing. I pointed out that most of them could be solved without guessing if you knew a few square roots.

sqrt(75) = 5 * sqrt(3), and if you know that sqrt(3) = 1.723, why guess? But that comes from years of doing trig and looking up the roots and logs and such in the tables at the back of the book, which no one has to do any more, because there are sophisticated calculators.

My local useless newspaper dropped Fox Trot inferring that it had been discontinued. I am glad to find out that it has not been discontinued.

Eh heres my awnser:just read the read the comic _

I think that Jason and Marcus are on to something.

The old Random Pencil Selection Algorithm.

Got it in one. (A)

Aaaa! Teachers never expect me to memorize atomic masses! A periodic table is always given!

Im guessing its A….

No way, literally had a math test and this was the bonus problem, so I came here to see if it was a foxtrot reference.(He’s already done multiple)

That would totally break the leads