I’m going through a rough period right now. There’s an illness in my family and I’m having a hard time focusing on anything but worrying and trying to take care of health stuff. Everyone is going to be okay, but it’s going to be a difficult four or five months, and I really appreciate your …
Author Archives: Randall
Miscellaneous
Color Survey People have made some fun things with the color survey data already. Howard Yeend did a 3D visualization, Gissehel made some maps out of the raw data, and Rune Grimstad made a color picker tool. Also, Jacob Rus nerd sniped me with this, which is not related to the color survey but I’m …
Sex and Gender
I’ve gotten a few emails and /msgs about this so I really wanted to post a clarification. When I put the color survey together, I was mostly interested in making maps and tables of color names; the opening survey was almost an afterthought. Finn added a question about chromosomal sex, since it’s closely correlated with colorblindness …
Color Survey Results
Who in the rainbow can draw the line where the violet tint ends and the orange tint begins? Distinctly we see the difference of the colors, but where exactly does the one first blendingly enter into the other? So with sanity and insanity. —Herman Melville, Billy Budd Orange, red? I don’t know what to believe …
Color Name Survey
I’d like your help for a color name survey! The survey shows you colors, and you type a name (word or phrase) you might use for that color. The names can be as broad or specific as you want. The survey is here: http://aram.xkcd.com/color/ My friend Finn (relsqui on #xkcd) wrote the frontend. I’m doing the analysis, …
Math Puzzle
This cool puzzle (and solution) comes from my friend Mike. Alice secretly picks two different real numbers by an unknown process and puts them in two (abstract) envelopes. Bob chooses one of the two envelopes randomly (with a fair coin toss), and shows you the number in that envelope. You must now guess whether the …
Android Bug Reports, Songs, Rovers
The following is a partial list of bugs in Android (or associated software) which have impacted my actual life in some way. Some may have been fixed since I last encountered them. When navigation is muted, but you hit volume down just to be safe, it unmutes and starts blaring, waking other passengers on the …
Books and Laptops and Bugs
Hey! To anyone in the Boston area who wants to get an xkcd book signed, I’ll be doing a signing event at MIT this Thursday (the 17th). It’s in Room 26-100 from 6:00 to 8:00 PM. Details are here. The event is free, and there will be books for sale there. I’ve been pretty busy …
Notes
I had a lot of fun putting together today’s comic. Anyone who likes strange charts like this should check out Edward Tufte’s The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. It’s long been one of my favorite books. Thank you to my friend Tina for color advice, and to my brother Ricky for some Lord of the …
Signed Book Timeline
When I put my book up for sale, I thought it would be neat to offer the option of a signed copy to people who ordered in the first 24 hours. It was a popular option (more popular than we expected), and some people are wondering why they took so long to get there (most …
xkcd 