Randall Munroe Quotes

I'm not sure why we romanticize 'young love,' or love in general ... It just leads to the idea that either your love is pure, perfect and eternal, and you are storybook-compatible in every way with no problems, or you're LYING when you say 'I love you.

A million people can call the mountains a fiction, yet it need not trouble you as you stand atop them.

Child from a parent who self-fertilized would be like a clone of the parent with severe genetic damage. The parent would have all the genes the child would, but the child wouldn't have all the genes

Eventually, they give up, and the unexplained meteorological phenomenon is simply called a "dubstep storm," because - in the words of one researcher - "It had one hell of a drop.

I like it when things catch fire and explode, which means I do not have your best interests in mind.

In fact, humans on Titan could fly by muscle power. A human in a hang glider could comfortably take off and cruise around powered by oversized swim-flipper boots - or even take off by flapping artificial wings. The power requirements are minimal - it would probably take no more effort than walking.

On one hand, humans and computers do very different types of thinking, so comparing them is like comparing apples and oranges.
On the other hand, apples are better.

If people had wheels and could fly, how would we differentiate them from airplanes? - Anonymous

Then the 92nd little pig built a house out of depleted uranium and the wolf was like, "dude.

I think the comic that's gotten me the most feedback is actually the one about the stoplights. Noticing when the stoplights are in sync, or calculating the length of your strides between floor tiles - normal people notice that kind of stuff, but a certain kind of person will do some calculations.

There's no material safety data sheet for astatine. If there were, it would just be the word "NO" scrawled over and over in charred blood.

So Yoda sounds like our best bet as an energy source. But with world electricity consumption pushing 2 terawatts, it would take a hundred million Yodas to meet our demands. All things considered, switching to Yoda power probably isn't worth the trouble - though it would definitely be green.

A child from a parent who self-fertilized would be like a clone of the parent with severe genetic damage.

The lesson: If the optimist says the glass is half full, and the pessimist says the glass is half empty, the physicist ducks.

I learned very early on in life that not everyone wants to hear every fact in the world, even if you want to tell them everything you've ever read.

lightning Collecting all the world's lightning into one place is obviously impossible. What about gathering all the lightning from just one area? No place on Earth has constant lightning, but there's an area in Venezuela that comes close. Near the southwestern edge of Lake Maracaibo, there's a strange phenomenon: perpetual nighttime thunderstorms. There

Problem Boats
We keep extra boats stuck to these doors for people to use if there's a problem that makes them not want to be in space anymore, but no one will come get them.

Actually, what I'm confused about is how.

This quote is often falsely attributed to Mark Twain.

Trees make babies by dropping tiny wooden tree eggs on the ground.

A world of random soul mates would be a lonely one. Let's hope that's not what we live in.

REENTERING SPACECRAFT HEAT UP because they're compressing the air in front of them (not, as is commonly believed, because of air friction).

Maybe we'll all be killed by nanobots hours after you read this sentence.

That's one in 27 quinquatrigintillion.

The most common genetic disorder caused by inbreeding is spinal muscular atrophy (SMA). SMA causes the death of the cells in the spinal cord, and is often fatal or severely disabling.

A submarine is about as safe as a submarine safe (a submarine safe is not to be confused with a safe in a submarine - a safe in a submarine is substantially safer than a submarine safe).

Maybe civilization will collapse, we'll all succumb to disease and famine, and the last of us will be eaten by cats. Maybe we'll all be killed by nanobots hours after you read this sentence. There's no way to know.

Remember: I am a cartoonist. If you follow my advice on safety around nuclear materials, you probably deserve whatever happens to you.

There were no earthworms in New England when the European colonists arrived.

You can work through the physics of interstellar radio attenuation,1 but the problem is captured pretty well by considering the economics of the situation: If your TV signals are getting to another star, you're wasting money. Powering a transmitter is expensive, and creatures on other stars aren't buying the products in the TV commercials that pay your power bill. The full picture is more complicated, but the bottom

I can't remember where I heard this, but someone once said that defending a position by citing free speech is sort of the ultimate concession; you're saying that the most compelling thing you can say for your position is that it's not literally illegal to express.

computers are limited by our ability to program them, so we've got a built-in advantage. Instead,

For starters, would your soul mate even still be alive? A hundred billion or so humans have ever lived, but only seven billion are alive now (which gives the human condition a 93 percent mortality rate). If we were all paired up at random, 90 percent of our soul mates would be long dead.

Thin Burning Light Gun
If the car found life, it could try to use this gun to learn about it, but the life might not be alive when it was done.

The official record for the fastest manmade object is the Helios 2 probe, which reached about 70 km/s in a close swing around the Sun. But it's possible the actual holder of that title is a two-ton metal manhole cover. The cover sat atop a shaft at an underground nuclear test site operated by Los Alamos as part of Operation Plumbbob. When the 1-kiloton nuke went off below, the facility effectively became a nuclear potato cannon, giving the cap a gigantic kick. A high-speed camera trained on the lid caught only one frame of it moving upward before it vanished - which means it was moving at a minimum of 66 km/s. The cap was never found.

Every night, around midnight GMT, the Sun sets on the Cayman Islands, and doesn't rise over the British Indian Ocean Territory until after 1:00 a.m. For that hour, the little Pitcairn Islands in the South Pacific are the only British territory in the Sun. The Pitcairn Islands have a population of a few dozen people, the descendants of the mutineers from the HMS Bounty. The islands became notorious in 2004 when a third of the adult male population, including the mayor, were convicted of child sexual abuse. As awful as the islands may be, they remain part of the British Empire, and unless they're kicked out, the two-century-long British daylight will continue.

Q. This may be a bit gruesome, but ... if someone's DNA suddenly vanished, how long would that person last?

IF YOU WANT TO transfer a few hundred gigabytes of data, it's generally faster to FedEx a hard drive than to send the files over the Internet. This isn't a new idea - it's often dubbed "SneakerNet" - and it's even how Google transfers large amounts of data internally.

Cook's The Science of Good Cooking was also helpful.

This would be something never before seen in the history of the universe: an underground shooting star.

Red Delicious apples, whose misleading name is a travesty.

The Moon would shine as brightly as the midmorning sun, and by the end of the two minutes, the lunar regolith would be heated to a glow.

If 'other people have experiences incorrectly' is annoying to you, think how unbearable it must be to have a condescending stranger tell you they hate the way you're experiencing your life at just the moment you've found something you want to remember.

The thing about the Internet is that you can write something ... for a very narrow audience and make a living at it.

Anyone who says that they're great at communicating but 'people are bad at listening' is confused about how communication works.

Hans Moravec's book Robot: Mere Machine to Transcendent Mind.

In a billion years, Earth will become a second Venus.

News networks giving a greater voice to viewers because the social web is so popular are like a chef on the Titanic who, seeing the looming iceberg and fleeing customers, figures ice is the future and starts making snow cones.

Air has very little viscosity. That is, it's not gooey. That means things flying through the air experience drag because of the momentum of the air they're shoving out of the way - not from cohesion between the air molecules. It's more like pushing your hand through a bathtub full of water than a bathtub full of honey.

I mean, I guess it's just me who argues that; but I'm very vocal.

In the Clarendon Laboratory at Oxford University sits a battery-powered bell that has been ringing since the year 1840. The bell "rings" so quietly it's almost inaudible, using only a tiny amount of charge with every motion of the clapper. Nobody knows exactly what kind of batteries it uses because nobody wants to take it apart to figure it out. Sadly, there's no light hooked up to it.

I never trust anyone who's more excited about success than about doing the thing they want to be successful at.

As far as I know, this steak question originally came up in a lengthy 4chan thread, which quickly disintegrated into poorly informed physics tirades intermixed with homophobic slurs. There was no clear conclusion.

We'd end up with a mole planet slightly larger than the Moon.

It's tempting to just write a comic called 'Everyone Mail Randall Munroe Twenty Bucks' - maybe it would work, and I could just close down the 'xkcd' store and sit on a beach and draw pictures and make snarky Reddit posts for the rest of my life.

I got in touch with a friend of mine who works at a research reactor, and asked him what he thought would happen to someone who tried to swim in their radiation containment pool. "In our reactor?" He thought about it for a moment. "You'd die pretty quickly, before reaching the water, from gunshot wounds.

But I've never seen the Icarus story as a lesson about the limitations of humans. I see it as a lesson about the limitations of wax as an adhesive.

Periodic Wall of the Elements Q. What would happen if you made a periodic table out of cube-shaped bricks, where each brick was made of the corresponding element?

That's if everything goes as planned.

But what about gender and sexual orientation? And culture? And language? We could keep using demographics to try to narrow things down further, but we would be drifting away from the idea of a random soulmate. In our scenario, you wouldn't know anything about who your soulmate was until you looked into their eyes. Everybody would have only one orientation: towards their soulmate.

To DNA, our most complex programming projects are like pocket calculators.

The upshot is: Your plane would fly pretty well, except it would be on fire the whole time, and then it would stop flying, and then stop being a plane. The

If you liked it, then you should have moved a mass inside its Roche limit.

Plausible that a professional pitcher with some time to practice could throw a golf ball faster than a baseball.

Do not try any of this at home. The author of this book is an Internet cartoonist, not a health or safety expert. He likes it when things catch fire or explode, which means he does not have your best interests in mind. The publisher and the author disclaim responsibility for any adverse effects resulting, directly or indirectly, from information contained in this book.

Once I got married, I started working from an office. I found that having somewhere to go that isn't my house is mentally helpful: 'This is the place where I answer email and write blog posts,' and 'over there is the place where I do the dishes.'

The explosion would be just the right size to maximize the amount of paperwork your lab would face. If the explosion were smaller, you could potentially cover it up. If it were larger, there would be no one left in the city to submit paperwork to.

A 1-watt laser is an extremely dangerous thing. It's not just powerful enough to blind you - it's capable of burning skin and setting things on fire. Obviously, they're not legal for consumer purchase in the US. Just kidding! You can pick one up for $300. Just do a search for "1-watt handheld laser." So, suppose we spend the $2 trillion to buy 1-watt green lasers for everyone. (Memo to presidential candidates: This policy would win my vote.)

Man, Farmville is so huge! Do you realize it's the second-biggest browser-based social-networking-centered farming game in the world?

But maybe it won't. Maybe it will take on a role like the TCP protocol, where it becomes a piece of infrastructure on which other things are built, and has the inertia of consensus.

Without us, Earth's geology will grind on. Winds and rain and blowing sand will dissolve and bury the artifacts of our civilization. Human-caused climate change will probably delay the start of the next glaciation, but we haven't ended the cycle of ice ages. Eventually, the glaciers will advance again. A million years from now, few human artifacts will remain.

Plumes of hot meat and bubbles of trapped gases like methane - along with the air from the lungs of the deceased moles - would periodically rise through the mole crust and erupt volcanically from the surface, a geyser of death blasting mole bodies free of the planet.

Q. Is it possible to build a jetpack using downward-firing machine guns? - Rob B A. I WAS SORT OF surprised to find that the answer was yes! But to really do it right, you'll want to talk to the Russians.

Falling from great heights is dangerous.[citation needed] A balloon could

much eye contact as possible. We could put together massive conveyer belts

A. Nearly everyone would die. Then things would get interesting.

What would happen if everyone on Earth stood as close to each other as they could and jumped, everyone landing on the ground at the same instant? - Thomas Bennett (and many others)

THE RICHTER SCALE, WHICH has technically been replaced by the "moment magnitude"1 scale, measures the energy released by an earthquake.

If an asteroid was very small but supermassive, could you really live on it like the Little Prince?

Given all the stress and pressure, some people would fake it. They'd want to join the club, so they'd get together with another lonely person and stage a fake soul mate encounter. They'd marry, hide their relationship problems, and struggle to present a happy face to their friends and family.

I have never seen a work of fiction so perfectly capture the out-of-nowhere shock of discovering that you've just bricked something important because you didn't pay enough attention to a loose wire.

A magnitude 15 earthquake would involve the release of almost 1032 joules of energy, which is roughly the gravitational binding energy of the Earth. To put it another way, the Death Star caused a magnitude 15 earthquake on Alderaan.

Hockey players can also brace pretty hard against the ice. A player skating at full speed can stop in the space of a few meters, which means the force they're exerting on the ice is pretty substantial. (It also suggests that if you started to slowly rotate a hockey rink, it could tilt up to 50 degrees before the players would all slide to one end. Clearly, experiments are needed to confirm this.)

Take wrong turns. Talk to strangers. Open unmarked doors. And if you see a group of people in a field, go find out what they are doing. Do things without always knowing how they'll turn out. You're curious and smart and bored, and all you see is the choice between working hard and slacking off. There are so many adventures that you miss because you're waiting to think of a plan. To find them, look for tiny interesting choices. And remember that you are always making up the future as you go.

On to the sixth row! No matter how careful you are, the sixth row would definitely kill you.

Manhattan has been continuously inhabited for the past 3000 years, and was first settled by humans perhaps 9000 years ago.

I still don't know whether there are more hard or soft things in the world,

I read comics and I did science, and never really put them together until I accidentally found myself in the middle of one.

Of the 28 people killed by lightning in the US in 2012, 13 were standing under or near trees.

Burning selenium can make sulfur smell like Chanel.

Things are rarely just crazy enough to work, but they're frequently just crazy enough to fail hilariously.

I think the really cool and compelling thing about math and physics is that it opens up entry to all these hypotheticals - or at least, it gives you the language to talk about them. But at the same time, if a scenario is completely disconnected from reality, it's not all that interesting.

To occasional heat waves - ice in the Martian soil occasionally melts and flows as a liquid.

Google owns YouTube, and recently, I drew a comic about an idea for a YouTube feature - which they actually took seriously and implemented. So I'm thinking that maybe we'll have a future where Google is 'xkcd.'

But what kind of person makes tea in a blender?

Temperature is a measure of the average kinetic energy of a collection of particles.

If you set out a cup of warm water on Mars, it'll try to boil, freeze, and sublimate, practically all at once. Water on Mars seems to want to be in any state except liquid.

Blue-green algae, or cyanobacteria, were the first photosynthesizers. They breathed in carbon dioxide and breathed out oxygen. Oxygen is a volatile gas; it causes iron to rust (oxidation) and wood to burn (vigorous oxidation). When cyanobacteria first appeared, the oxygen they breathed out was toxic to nearly all other forms of life. The resulting extinction is called the oxygen catastrophe. After the cyanobacteria pumped Earth's atmosphere and water full of toxic oxygen, creatures evolved that took advantage of the gas's volatile nature to enable new biological processes. We are the descendants of those first oxygen-breathers. Many details of this history remain uncertain; the world of a billion years ago is difficult to reconstruct.

If humans escape the solar system and outlive the Sun, our descendants may someday live on one of these planets. Atoms from Times Square, cycled through the heart of the Sun, will form our new bodies. One day, either we will all be dead, or we will all be New Yorkers.

GPS timing is incredibly precise; of all the problems in engineering, it's one of the only ones in which engineers have been forced to include both special and general relativity in their calculations.