MIT has a BattleCode programming competition, (which reminds me of Robowar, the reason I didn’t have a high-school social life). This year, [at least] one of the teams was a group of xkcd readers — Nicole, Bobby, and Jessica. They are fun people who I actually had the pleasure of meeting briefly while visiting Boston …
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In which I lose the originals of the last three months of comics and the laptop I create them with.
I draw all my comics on paper, but I scan and process them on my lovely Fujitsu Lifebook P1510, a tiny hybrid tablet computer (it’s the size of a hardback book). I have high-resolution versions of all the comics, which I use for print versions and shirts and such. I used to save them to …
Large numbers
I mentioned an extremely large number in this comic, and then talked a little about comparing it to another large number in this blag post. But all the numbers discussed had a sense of arbitrariness to them. The xkcd number was just a function that grew rapidly plus a large argument. I’ve been thinking about …
Velociraptor Safety
I recently received a letter from Dr. Daniel Snyder, a paleontologist from Knox College, who wanted to share some theories on handling dromeosaurids: Dear sir, I have recently been introduced to your Web comic, and I write in great admiration. You have a keen mind and wit, as well as the artistic ability to convey …
Washington's Farewell Address Translated into Everyday Speech
I’ve often heard that Washington’s ‘Farewell Address’ — the speech he sent out (in written form) to a bunch of papers at the end of his second term — is important. Apparently he lays down a lot of good ideas for America. But the common style of writing and vocabulary has changed since then. Maybe …
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The Clarkkkkson vs. the xkcd Number
I just stumbled upon this webpage in which some kid (years ago, presumably in high school) who uses odd slang defined a huge number by putting various operators together and making recursive call after recursive call. He supposes that this is the biggest number anyone’s ever bothered to concisely define. My intuition is that A(g64, …
iPod Announcement Five Years Ago
Every now and then when new products are announced, I like to take a moment and go back to read the Mac Rumors forum thread from when the iPod was first announced. http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=500 It only gets better the further you go. Arguments one after the next explaining why the iPod will be a collosal failure …
Johnny Cash will not leave me alone.
I once shot a man in Reno as he calculated pi. I once shot a man in Reno ’cause he was a samurai. I once shot a man in Reno ’cause he smiled and I’m shy. I once kissed a girl in Reno but I think I might be bi. I once shot a man …
Renaissance Artists in a Half-Shell
Today’s comic provoked an awful lot of discussion on the forums, the LJ feed, and in my inbox over the respective notoriety of the various turtles/artists. I got the percentages in the graph through Google. But direct Google comparison of turtles and artists has the problem that the artists seem to turn up quite a …
The Map of the Internet
Some additional information on the map in today’s comic: The labeled websites (“Google”, “Flickr”, “Slashdot”, etc) are just based on the location of the particular server I got when I pinged the site from my home machine on the day I was working on the map. Each site there has many servers and mirrors, and …
