(Note: Firefox crashed just as I was finishing this post. This is a terse recreation, as I’m about to collapse.)
I gave a talk at MIT yesterday (now the day before yesterday). It was wonderful. I had never really done this kind of thing before, but it went so much better than I expected. I had someone tell me afterward that my talk was better than the one by the Penny Arcade guys, and that I was funnier in real life than in the comic. It’s hard to imagine better praise than that.
The talk sold out early and the place was packed:

I was stalked by RoboRaptors and pelted with playpen balls (which fell from the ceiling in the middle of the talk, courtesy some mysterious party) :

Feeling a lot less tired than I look in this picture, I signed playpen balls (with jokes about spherical geometry), comic prints, tickets, and — at one point — breasts.

There are more pictures here.
Firefox keeps crashing. Here are some brief Things I Did:
– Made fun of audience member’s mom, said “fuck you” to some of the world’s top young computational linguists, and answered a question by whistling the “Katamari Damacy” theme.
– Finally managed to give davean credit for all his work, in public, in circumstances where he couldn’t escape. He pretended to be annoyed later, but only a little.
– Met lovely people who twirled burning things at high speeds out on the lawn at night.
Oh, and I don’t know of any video of the lecture yet, aside from one bit floating around. It should be out there somewhere. But hour-long videos with troubled audio are no fun — what I’d like to find is a transcript, like the one of the Penny Arcade talk (although those are a lot of work to create). But I’m content just remembering how cool it all was.
Thank you to everyone involved, and I’m sorry to everyone who I couldn’t give enough time to that night (after the lecture, I was meeting and talking to so many people that I had trouble keeping track of who was where and when, or who I was speaking with from one minute to the next). But it was a lot of fun. Let’s do this again sometime soon.
Can’t believe nobody thought of filming it!
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please contact me at scottz@punknet.org
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“LSC did get an official copy of most, but not all (they ran out of battery) of your talk.”
L S C…
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COMIC 226 NEEDED A BIGGER 4CHAN!
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*seconds ZoFreX* Come to Bristol Uni! I’d have so loved to see this, congrats on the success:)
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One would think that being required to add would deter spammers.
Apparently not…
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YEAH DUHR /b/ is unstopppable
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I feel privileged to have no idea what /b/ means, although if this is the sort of thing that comes from /b/, perhaps we should lock them away from the rest of the internet.
… it used to be a research network… sigh
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I’m gunna throw a plug in there for the small liberal arts college: University of Mary Washington! I don’t expect it, but hell, wouldn’t that be cool.
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There are enough Waterloo-ians on here that I’m going to throw in my voice too. Waterloo for the win!
If I lived near MIT I would have been there…*sigh*
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If you do come to the UK, I would love to try and get you to come to NPL, a lab full of physical scientists…
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come talk in or near l.a. please. and…you’re really really cute.
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Were you at Media in Transition?
Shame I didn’t see you there.
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Haha, Waterpoo.
How much do you guys really like xkcd? I mean, 3 votes from Waterloo-types and 1 from a McMaster student, sure, but last I checked, the University of Toronto has xkcd comics running in the Toike Oike ( http://toike.skule.ca ), and has this entire past year… top that!
In conclusion, you should come to U of T, QED.
flame ++;
😉
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Come to Penn! We’ll give you all the cheesesteaks you can eat! I know for a fact that you’re popular among the materials science kids…
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I think the U of T guy has a fantastic point….
I mean Waterpoo? That’s a wit at its absolute finest. A true indication of higher education 😛
(for the record I go to Carleton, not Waterloo. I just couldn’t resist a jab at U of T… and for those of you who are wondering, and I know you’re out there cause I get asked about this all too often, Carleton is in Ottawa)
Steve
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I go to Waterloo too! But if you come to do a lecture please don’t come in this summer! I’m on a co-op term and won’t be able to get to campus… (although I would make an effort). Or come in two different semesters so that the co-op kids will have rotated through.
UofT students are just jealous that they didn’t get into Waterloo!
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Alas, I was unable to go to this talk, since I no longer live in the area (though I had known about plans for it since early January or so). But a friend who was there recently gave me one of the signed playpen balls, which has one guy on it saying, “Hold on guys, Let’s take the Lagrangian!” and the other guy saying, “No.” I am now the coolest person in Ohio.
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… SUCKS!
(you’re welcome, anonymous)
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wow this is an international comic
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XCKD WORLD TOUR
I can see it in lights 🙂
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Longest and most entertainingly ridiculous spam post I’ve ever seen.. please save it for posterity….
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On top of that great spam post… even though this blag post is pretty old, I wanted to say that the speech sounds like it was great. I think that the number of people who asked you to come to their colleges says a lot about your popularity. I won’t try, since I doubt that a comment could make you choose your next speaking engagement location.
Thanks for writing the comment.
Arjun
PS> Fuck it… Univ. of Southern California. Maybe?
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Oh, and even though I don’t attend there, I second the vote to go speak at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. It’s an awesome place, despite being in Worcester, and I bet you also have tons of fans there.
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Don’t attend there *anymore*, I mean. I’m an alum!
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re: nelson
i totally second that motion– UC berkeley, fo’ shizz.
damnit, randall. us public schools don’t get none o’ yo’ lovin’.
yeah okay, i’m done being a fangirl. *squee*~ 😉
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UCBerkeley, please.
and …
did I dream a strip a few weeks ago in which the guy’s blithering on about how hugging a woman provokes release of oxytocin, then offers her a hug and she backs off accusing him of psychological witchery? I was offline for three weeks, was sure I saw it the night I got home, and haven’t found it since. Or did someone imitate your style so convincingly I’m utterly confused? Likely so.
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I would request a world college tour with the University of Delaware as one of the stops but, well, it’s DE. So, anywhere in the surrounding oh say 100 miles would work just as fabulously. Please? I enjoy driving.
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                     。  
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I know this post is uberold, but you truly need to come to the University of Texas at Dallas. We have the top-ranked chess team in the country, one of the top ranked programming teams in the country and more nerds than you can shake a stick at. Even the humanities kids are geekasaurus rexes. You’d need a bodyguard.
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Next time come to [Knox College] in [Galesburg, IL] because [we have, quiet possibly, the nerdiest campus ever] and [one of our visiting professors wrote to you and you posted it :D]!
/random comment on old blag post
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I LOVE YOU MAN!!!!
Ah, this world seems not so out of reach…wow you’re awesome. I can’t get over how awesome you are, and even if you aren’t what kick-ass+ness that you only show how awesome you are.
And the kite?! Inviting people to fly the kite with you?? YOU FLY A KITE! Like all the normal kite flying people, but it’s so dreamy, but you talk about maths, and all that other stuff too. And I don’t know who does your speech bubble layout but it’s done really well. There is skill in laying out stuff like that…well I hope somebody helped you (I’m a designer) because if you did it all by yourself then you’re just way too awesome and seeing awesome people makes one really happy and when I get really happy I type lengthy comments twirl around and start voodoo-majik to life with a guy that…flies kites, and draws cute pictures…the balls n dinosaur and well maths and space and robots.
OKAY! moving along…the robot9000 is a great idea. I’m going to try it.
can u find duplicate sayings in the logs???
Like two people saying the same thing but at different times?
(The Ghost game…I once tried thinking about an apple for a really long time. If you hold a picture in your head and concentrate on it for a lengthy period you begin to feel quite annoyed and give up…but if you do it long enough something interesting is bound to happen, to the apple.
Oh another random thing, i wear contact lenses, and because of that I don’t really need to blink, I can have my eyes open for at least an hour or so. I once tried this, it felt like time doesn’t exist…like a feeling of infinity. My brain’s not used to staring without blinking…if nyou wear contacts you can try it…blah blah bunch of stuff I should delete but left it because I didn’t want this to be a waste of typing :P)
Thank you so much for the comic, blog, you.
You have inspired me greatly!
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Anyone else get half way through that giant spam post and think ‘man, this lecture *sucked*’?
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Aw….I missed it? And I told myself to remember the date too. Damn the complexities of a high school life.
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Full video here.
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My mistake, that’s at Google. Oh well.
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Wait, that’s actually at Google. Oh well.
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Sigh. I fail at posts.
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Don?t attend there *anymore*, I mean. I?m an alum!
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Alas, I was unable to go to this talk, since I no longer live in the area (though I had known about plans for it since early January or so). But a friend who was there recently gave me one of the signed playpen balls, which has one guy on it saying, “Hold on guys, Let’s take the Lagrangian!” and the other guy saying, “No.” I am now the coolest person in Ohio.
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Alas, I was unable to go to this talk, since I no longer live in the area (though I had known about plans for it since early January or so). But a friend who was there recently gave me one of the signed playpen balls, which has one guy on it saying, “Hold on guys, Let’s take the Lagrangian!” and the other guy saying, “No.” I am now the coolest person in Ohio.
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Thanks for all your hard work on this blog.
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Firefox is always crashing on me too!! I think its all the add ons I have
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