#if you request a cat ive already drawn i will just draw them once more btw

[firestars-twolegs]

Hey there! Figured i should put it out there that if you like my work I have a ko-fi that you could consider checking out.

I'm not taking commissions as of now, however, if you donate any amount you can suggest a warrior cat and i will draw them. Not closeing free requests but those are always something i do on a whim. Anything coming though ko-fi will be done not matter what.

Thank you for your time :]

[fightevilandthengetblownup]

My Design Verse IV

He was running late.

It wasn't a completely unusual occurance in the last six months since he'd been cleared of any involvement in the Copy Cat murders, but it still was enough to make Will feel on edge.

He couldn't quite tell when, but at some point during the night there had been a power surge from an electrical storm. His alarm clock had stopped and he had over slept. His months under Chilton's care however helped ensure he was up early and only running fifteen minutes behind schedule.

It was an unusual time of year for such storms though and he could hear the soft, knowing voice whispering to him that it was a sign, an omen. That electrical storms were the start of darkness descending upon an area. He fought hard to shake the voice from his head and the shiver it brought up from his spine. It had been a month since he'd seen her, and he was determined not to fall back into madness chasing after another ghost.

Will raced across the lawns of Quantico towards his lecture room. Hopefully the students wouldn't have left yet despite his tardiness. Today's lecture was on how to test a profile against another.

As he approached the lecture hall, expecting silence or the dull hum of many voices talking to each other at once, he found himself frowning when only the sound of his shoes on the tiles and one professional sounding voice could be heard - though the exact voice and words were muffled by the closed lecture hall doors.

Someone else was lecturing his class.

Walking faster, Will propelled himself forward and pushed through the doors quickly, calling out harshly, "Sorry that I'm late class, we're good to begin in a moment."

"No need to fret, Will dear. I've already started today's lecture for you."

The voice froze him in place, eyes wide as he looked across into the space beside his podium and his desk, where she stood. His bloody angel, illuminated in the glow of the teaching spot light.

She didn't look like herself though, her true self with bruises and blood stains and a smile that made his stomach twist every morning that he woke up having been inches away from claiming it amongst the blood and hauntingly beautiful imagery his brain would concoct for her each night. She appeared to have a brunette wig on, a shoulder length one at that which was almost dead straight with full bangs that drew him into her eyes through the bright red glasses disguising them. She was wearing a suit too - a navy pencil skirt and blazer with a plain white blouse. The heels she wore made him want to cry for the dirty boots she'd left beside his door.

However different she looked on the outside, as he stumbled towards her, he could see her - see you - underneath it in the twitch of her lips and the dark of her eyes. Will knew abstractly that his students would be whispering about him, about his jerky movements until he was at her side, about his hand twitching out to touch her arm to confirm she was really there. But they would have no idea what it was really about.

"Thank you for arriving though, Mr. Graham. I'll just continue now after the interruption." Her voice had a cool professional tone to it, as if discussing the weather not how to profile a serial killer, and held none of the warmth and twang he had come to associate with her. Just as he thought he was imagining her onto someone else, his lure shot him that smile as she clicked the teleprompter - flashing the crime scene he'd queried her about onto the board.

"Now, this here is a particularly hard case. Three victims. All young women. No signs of forced entry. Of any kind, mind you." her words were punctuated with a change in crime scene photo illustrating each point. "Each victim killed through a different means. Throat slit and fire. Disembowelment. Torture." The photos were almost too gruesome for the images to be shown to a class, and a few of the students appeared to be getting very near I'll. "Various markers around the scene - knife marks, the shaved hair clumps, the displaying of the last victim. What are your theories?"

There was a murmur through the class. Will rarely requested input in his lectures during such disturbing times - the last image being displayed a close up of the once blonde girl's face, bloody finger trails down her chin and to wrap around her bruised and choked neck - but their guest lecturer was unphased and unmoved as she stared about the class.

"Anyone?"

"They're another copy cat. With the presentation!" One of his cockier students in the third row called out, with all eyes suddenly focussing on Will for a few seconds.

"Wrong. This individual cares nothing of the evil doing of any one else nor hiding their tracks by copying." She corrected the response so quickly, flicking through a few more images - the pool of entrails at the brunette's feet, the knife mark in the hallway, the gas fireplace with the redhead's charred remains. "Next profile?"

"A sadomasochist - the torture was to get them off for some reason. Punish the girls too. Like a... Ted Bundy?" One of the few female students suggested, uncertainty entering her voice as she finished.

"Oh he wishes he was Ted Bundy." His angel's laugh was still the same and Will found himself leaning towards her at the sound, like an alcoholic in the desert trying to get to the last drop of liquid in his bottle. "Where the punishment is there, it's clearly not of a sexual nature. Can anyone hazard a guess how we know that?"

"He shaved her head." Will found himself answering, feet drawing him closer to her to lean in, hand laying so tantalisingly close to her own atop his desk. "She lied to him. She made him think she was someone else, that she was his real target. But she was a fake blonde and didn't live up to expectations. She had to be punished for tricking him so."

"Exactly, Mr. Graham, the hair gives it away." He might have been imagining it, but he could have sworn she sounded breathier than usual. Sounded fixated. Sounded drawn in too. He thought he felt her fingers twitch like they wanted, needed, desired to touch his as much as he did too. "She wasn't his target and so she must be punished for it."

Neither one spoke for a long moment, staring at one another as his pendulum swung and he realised how close her insanity ran to his. If he'd just take the leap, just take the plunge, just surrender to it.

"What about the other two then?" The voice of one of the students snapped the trance like a jolt. Like a lightening strike. Like an electrical storm.

"The other two... Yes, the other two! Why were they killed in the order and fashion they were? Any one?" Her breathy tone returned to the clipped professional, non-region specific accent she'd been masking herself with, as the fake brunette turned to look around the room. "Why was the red head first and why was she torched after death?"

"He had a thing for blondes?"

"She was the first to open the door?"

"She struggled first?"

Her head shook with each answer, though Will thought he'd detected a small laugh of a cough at the first shout. The more questions she asked, the more his students found themselves engaging like he'd never seen them engage with him before. His heart felt constricted watching her so close to him, so close to a potential reality for them side by side teaching the next generation all they knew from their own tortured psyche.

"There's truth to the blonde theory - he was there for her, after all. But there must be a reason to destroy the body. Incinerate it beyond almost all recognition. The only reason we know she's a redhead is from dental records and the last photo of her from that night. Why would someone destroy something to that extent?"

"Because he hates it. Because it torments them to see it." The seductive voice came from the auditorium doors and made the bile rise up on Will's throat at the sound. He couldn't be here. He couldn't come near his angel, couldn't be allowed to see her - see you - or touch her or taste her. Doctor Letter entered the room, stepping into the slightly darkened door passages from where he had been lot behind like a halo of light surrounded him before being swallowed by the dark. Will barely noticed Jack entering beside him in his blind panic to conceal his lure from his tormentor. "The man wanted it gone, never wanted to see it again. It hurt him to see."

"You'd be right and wrong at the same time. No one would go to such lengths to mask one type of death with another while also having the psyche to have left the clear markers on the other bodies - so clearly there is emotion involved." Her voice cracked at the word emotion, his angel's face transformed in an instant at Hannibal's interference with her lecture into something that made Will's stomach twist almost as much as her smile did. Or perhaps it was how her fingers finally touched his own, rubbing gently and unseen against the inside of his wrist. "But hatred? If he hated it, he would have shorn her like the other whom he'd since despised for her lies. This was a remnant of a love. A long forgotten or buried one, but from that source comes a toxic, rage-inducing and all consuming reaction to it, that clearly has left an impact still such that he hates to continue to see it any further."

As Hannibal moved to open his mouth, her voice cut over him rudely - so rudely - to announce the end of the lecture. There were sounds of dismay from the class as a whole, but the teleprompter shuttered down devolving the room into darkness. She'd not reset the lights so there were calls of confusion and laughs from the students as they began to make their way out.

He felt more than saw her shift beside him, her hand squeezing his once tightly as she whispered softly, "That monster has nothing on yours. I'm sorry I suggested otherwise before." There was another squeeze and he wished he could have held on forever before her fingers slipped from his grasp.

Will could tell Hannibal and Jack alike were waiting to speak with him, and possibly be introduced to the guest he'd allowed to teach that day. But Will knew the moment that the lights would be back on she'd be gone, lost in the sea of students.

As one of the exiting class members flicked the lights on, Will steadied himself to discuss whatever the pair were there to talk with him about. He didn't have to turn to know she'd be gone. As the duo spoke to him about some new case, Will nodded where he had to and smiled his awkward smile they were used to before agreeing.

It wasn't until he began packing away her notes that he realised the photos weren't the FBI's photos but seemingly her own with their own notations. On the back of the photo of the fireplace, there was a post-it not asking him the most taunting question of all - How was she set on fire with no wood or gas connection on?

[mathematicianadda]

More Great Ways to Annoy a Mathematician

Which Ratio is Truly Golden?

I find it troubling that the golden ratio has so little in common with the golden rule.

Like, if you did unto others 1.618 times what you’d have them do unto you, then we’d all wind up exhausted.

And if you’re only doing 1/1.618 times unto them, then isn’t that a bit lazy?

  A Puzzle About Rates

I’ve always enjoyed those puzzles like, “If 3 chickens can lay 3 eggs in 3 days, then how long will it take 100 chickens to lay 100 eggs?” They’re counter-intuitive (e.g., in my example, each chicken lays 1 egg per 3 days, so the answer is also 3 days), yet deal only with simple constant rates.

So what if the rates weren’t constant? Like in, say, a bureaucracy, where 20 times more people will accomplish only 1/20th as much?

(Sorry for putting the answer upside down. It reads: “Please complete the attached form (Z302: Aggregate Task Completion Rate Information Request) and we’ll process your inquiry in 4-6 weeks.”)

  In this case, “a mathematician” refers specifically to Matt Parker, whose excellent book Humble Pi discusses the first two of these mistakes.

  The Asymptote of Happiness

Lots of poets have found asymptotes a convenient literary symbol – the idea of eternal striving is a resonant one (even beyond the eternal striving of the struggling algebra student).

  I love me some Raymond Smullyan.

Sorry again for putting the answer upside down. I dunno why I thought that was a clever idea. Mostly just forces you to turn off the auto-rotate setting on your phone.

Anyway, it reads: “Ask anything. You should already know not to buy lowfat yogurt.”)

  Proving a New Theorem

Not that I’ve ever felt this myself. I’m just speculating.

  P-R-E-N-A-T-A-L

What is parenting, if not a neat LARP?

(LARP = Live-Action Role-Playing Game, for those of you with less geeky acumen than I anticipate my audience to have.)

By the way, my friend Rayleen once described to me a brilliant comic, where one person asks, “When’s the baby due?” and the other person is drawn with a small horizontal stick figure emerging from their stick torso. (See? It’s such a good comic, I can just describe it.)

  The Sales Pitch for Math

I think a lot about the different arguments for math, and the ways that they support or contradict each other. Is it a beautiful art? An urgent set of universal civic skills? Key preparation for technical professions?

The answer is yes to all three. But not for all math, and not all at once – and attempting to blend the purposes can lead to a muddle.

  The Meaning of “Let”

It’s always tickled me that the mathematician’s verb “let,” which sounds so chill and laissez-faire, is actually a binding command.

  “All Happy Families Are Alike; Every Unhappy Family is Unhappy In Its Own Way”

I wrote a bunch of these a few years ago. This one has the benefit of being true: all circles are geometrically similar, but not all ellipses are.

(The same is true, by the way, of parabolas and hyperbolas. The former are all the same basic shape, just zoomed in or zoomed out, whereas the latter constitute a whole family of different shapes.)

(Chew on that, Tolstoy.)

  The Court-Appointed Translator

I wrote this little dialogue after listening to a great episode of The Allusionist, before it turned out that Game of Thrones would suffer the worst collapse in storytelling that I have ever experienced.

Oh well!

As my wife said, “At least this way we’ll never have to bargain with our daughter about when she’s old enough to watch Game of Thrones. The ending is so bad, in 10 or 15 years no one will be watching it anymore.”

  Identity Politics

This is a really dumb pun.

Also one of the more popular cartoons in this list.

Go figure.

  Another Dumb Pun

This one is inspired by that time Malcolm Gladwell referred to eigenvectors as “igon vectors,” and Steven Pinker blasted him for it, at which point Gladwell blasted Pinker for something else, and eventually we all lost the thread and just went about our days.

And if you want more godawful matrix puns, I’ve got ’em.

  I don’t know what day you’re reading this, but guess what? It’s also a bad approximation of pi! So go ahead and celebrate!

(Though if you want some very clever alternative pi days, check out Evelyn Lamb’s page-a-day calendar, which includes a Pi Day each month, and not where you’d expect!)

  Uncountably Many Wishes

After I posted this, there was a bunch of discussion on Twitter about whether I’d mischaracterized the Axiom of Choice, which is totally possible, in which case, oops.

Also, some folks pointed out that it’s pretty greedy to wish for uncountably many wishes, when you could just as easily wish for countably many.

To which I say: What’s the point of a magic lamp, if not to have greed be your undoing?

  Maximization vs. Minimization

For lots of optimization problems, maximizing makes sense, but minimizing doesn’t. (Or vice versa.) An example: What’s the largest rectangle you can make from 4 feet of wire?

It’s the 1-by-1 square, with an area of 1 square foot.

But what’s the smallest rectangle you can make (in terms of area)? Well, you could make the 1.9999 by 0.0001 rectangle, which has a very tiny area…

Or you could make the 1.999999 by 0.000001 rectangle, which has an even smaller area…

Or the 1.99999999999999 by 0.000000000000001 rectangle, whose area is microscopic…

…and so on.

I hope that was worth it! And I suspect it wasn’t! Anyway, moving on.

  More thoughts here.

  The Villainous Mathematician Explains His Plan

Clearly this villain should be assigning more group work.

Anyway, I for one am curious to know how a complex-valued currency might work. I’d pay a hefty fee for an accountant or tax attorney who can turn imaginary assets into real ones, or real debts into imaginary ones.

  The Cat on the Bed

I found it very hard to draw a decent space-filling curve.

Also, to draw a decent cat.

  Only Slept Four Hours

This is how I feel about anyone who sleeps less than 7 hours in a given night.

  Axioms of Life

This is my version of that xkcd about kitties.

Also pretty well summarizes parenthood. I still enjoy a cerebral geek-out, as I always have; but I also really enjoy holding my daughter in my arms and calling her the world’s best monkey over and over.

  How Many Stars?

I would totally read a graphic novel about the dating life of Georg Cantor.

The problem is that no one is going to write this graphic novel except for me.

Oh well. I’m under contract for two more books at the moment, but after that will come TRANSFINITE LOVE: THE ROMANTIC ESCAPADES OF A SET THEORIST.

  Quick-Draw Answers

Drawn from an actual experience, in my first week teaching 7th grade. I hadn’t really figured out how to tee up a problem-solving experience yet.

  Twenty Questions

Drew this one for a Jim Propp essay. Recommended as always!

  A New Proof

A teaching friend of mine had a whole list of proofs that 1 = 0, which he busted out at various developmentally appropriate points in grades 6 through 12.

I love that. Curious how far you could get writing a book of proofs that 1 = 0, each introducing a key idea in mathematics…

Maybe that’ll be my next project after the George Cantor romance novel.

  E = mc

Philosophical question: Is this a pun?

The case against: “A pun is a joke that plays on words that sound similar but mean different things. This isn’t doing that.”

The case for: “A pun is a joke that plays on linguistic expressions with similar surface features, but different deep meanings. This is doing exactly that: the premise of the joke is that an exponent and a footnote are both denoted with a superscript, yet mean very different things.”

So I guess this has a deep resemblance to puns, but lacks a surface resemblance… which is itself, not very pun-like.

Ruling: Not a pun!

  “The Exception Proves the Rule”

I guess you hear this inane phrase less often these days. But there was a time, kiddos, when people could hear a devastating counterexample to what they were arguing, and then blithely say “the exception proves the rule” with a straight face.

  The Math Sequence

I’m pretty agnostic on the math sequence. But I have strong intuitions that Star Wars should be screened in the order: IV, V, I, II, III, VI, and so on. (I view the sequels as pretty optional. Prequels too, for that matter, but if you limit yourself to the original trilogy, it’s a boring problem.)

  The “Same” Age

A lot of people on Facebook seemed to read this as though the right-hand character was creeping on Ariana Grande. Not my intention at all! I just wanted to pick a mid-20s celebrity. Could’ve just as easily been Bieber.

(My primary association with Ariana Grande, by the way, is her performance in the short-lived bar mitzvah-themed Broadway musical Thirteen.)

  Lemniskate

I’m not sure there’s a joke here.

I’m fond of this drawing anyway.

  Linear Child

Michael Pershan, the internet’s most relentlessly analytical math educator, inexplicably loved this joke, so I call it a win.

Someone on social media speculated about the position by which this linear combination had been “conceived,” which I found quite vulgar and upsetting (but which I also sort of invited by drawing a comic about procreating vectors).

  If P, then Q

Where do we draw the line between logical succession, and outright stalking? I leave that to the courts.

  Loons and Lunes

Sometimes I just want to do a cute drawing that has no joke in it, okay?

  The Vertical Line Test

I’m actually skeptical that the phrase “vertical line test” has any value. To me it feels like a fancy name for a fact that doesn’t need a fancy name. And, as in the two-column-proof version of geometry, giving fancy names to facts that students should be reasoning out for themselves can become obfuscatory rather than clarifying.

  Whose Fractal is Whose?

Please join me in making “Patricia gasket” a thing! E.g., “Did you know Copley Square in Boston is the approximate shape of the mathematical figure known as a Patricia Gasket?”

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