As many people have pointed out, my comic about tweets outrunning seismic waves seems to have been widely verified in yesterday’s earthquake: http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/earthquake-twitter-users-learned-tremors-226481 It’s always nice to see real-life confirmation of your calculations! The quake started in Virginia at 13:51:04 EST, where most of my family lives. Texts from my brother in Charlottesville (25 miles …
Author Archives: Randall
Oops!
I’m at a family reunion, where a YouTube-watching party inspired today’s comic. I woke up to find several emails letting me know, to my dismay, that the comic Doghouse Diaries has already done a similar strip about the same experience. I linked to their site last year when I posted my color survey results, but …
Family Illness
Last fall I posted about a family illness, but didn’t give a lot of details. In October my fiancée was diagnosed with stage III breast cancer. It’s rare for young women to get breast cancer, and she’s otherwise healthy and has no family history, so it was a real bolt from the blue. She’s been …
Answering Ben Stein's Question
Ben Stein published a pretty awful editorial defending Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the IMF head arrested for sexual assault. Now, I don’t disagree with him about the presumption of innocence, but the rest of the article effectively argues that smart, rich people simply don’t commit crimes. In particular, he says this: In life, events tend to follow …
Michael Bay's Scenario
Last year I drew a comic about the oil spill in which Michael Bay spun an over-the-top worst-case disaster scenario. One of the panels was actually slightly more plausible than the others. It was based on a real disaster which almost happened in 1973, and in two weeks it may come closer to happening than …
Radiation Chart Update
Ellen and I made our radiation chart in the early days of the Fukushima disaster. I intended it to provide context for radiation exposure levels reported in the media. I included a few example doses from monitoring sites around Fukushima (the only ones I could find at the time). But our main goal was to give …
Radiation Chart
There’s a lot of discussion of radiation from the Fukushima plants, along with comparisons to Three Mile Island and Chernobyl. Radiation levels are often described as “<X> times the normal level” or “<Y>% over the legal limit,” which can be pretty confusing. Ellen, a friend of mine who’s a student at Reed and Senior Reactor …
Parentheses
Every now and then, I stumble on a Wikipedia passage that makes me smile. I don’t usually share them, since calling attention to them almost certainly means they’ll be rewritten or deleted, but in this case I can’t resist. The following is from the Bracket article: Parentheses may also be nested (with one set (such …
Distraction Affliction Correction Extension
Lots of people have asked me for the system I used to implement the restriction in the alt-text of today’s comic. At various times, I thought of doing it with an X modification, Firefox extension, a Chrome add-on, an irssi script, etc—but none of them worked too well (or involved a lot of sustained undistracted …
Continue reading “Distraction Affliction Correction Extension”
Trochee Chart
Here’s something I made as I drew today’s comic. It’s a chart of Google results for “X Y” (in quotes) where X and Y are words from the first panel of the strip. The first word is on the top, the second down the side (the opposite of the intuitive way, of course). I generated …
xkcd 