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" 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. "

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" What people don't appreciate, when they picture Terminator-style automatons striding triumphantly across a mountain of human skulls, is how hard it is to keep your footing on something as unstable as a mountain of human skulls. Most humans probably couldn't manage it, and they've had a lifetime of practice at walking without falling over. "

Randall Munroe

Mountain

People

Practice

" I have the standard cartoonist setup, which is one of those Cintiq tablets, and a laptop. If I'm mostly writing code, I'm on the laptop, and if I'm mostly drawing, I'm on the Cintiq. "

" I'm just one of those people who can always tell the same story twice, forgetting that I've told it already. "

" I love learning about the science that governs the universe around us and want to share the delight of discovering how things work and why. "

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

" People in my world can be disdainful of political and social problems and solutions. But we're never going to stop needing those. "

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

" There are definitely times - and I think this is pretty common among cartoonists - where you spend an entire day trying to think of an idea, and you're like, 'I give up.' And then you go and take a shower or run an errand, and halfway there, you get an idea. "

" 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. "

" One of the things I've learned with doing 'xkcd' is that you sort of give people, 'Here's the thing, and here's the button you can press to get another thing.' Sometimes that can be more easy to digest than, 'Here's a long page of things.' "

" I think that putting merchandising into the hands of the artist themselves is one of the best things for the artist. "

" I'm sad that my childhood came just slightly before the lithium-ion-battery boom, because I would've killed for the cheap radio-controlled helicopters they have now. "

" A lot of people will refer to comics by number to me, and I'll realize they're expecting me to remember all the comics by number. And I can't even remember what I ate this morning, let alone which comic was #473! "

Randall Munroe

People

Alone

" 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. "

" One of the nice things about the Internet is you can do a comic that's just for Ph.D. students, or for truck drivers, and you get to reach all of them without having to satisfy the other 99%. "

" I used to work at NASA in Virginia. It was nothing glamorous; I was just tasked with making code compile for obscure projects, and I wasn't very good at it. Now I spend most of my time drawing pictures and looking at funny things on the Internet, which in retrospect is largely what I did at my old job, too. "

" A lot of the time, when I find myself critiquing scientific accuracy in movies, I have to remind myself that it had to get close enough to getting it right to get things wrong. "

" Some of the first infographics I did started off as notes to myself: trying to plot out, for instance, how IP addresses are allocated. After a while, I thought, 'This is a neat thing I can share with people, and they can follow me along in that process of understanding.' "

Randall Munroe

Myself

Process

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

" It used to be if you wanted to do a newspaper comic, you had to appeal to a pretty big chunk of the newspaper's readership for them to want to keep you around. 'Dilbert' would be office humor, but even that is pretty widely experienced. "

" It's amazing what's buried in old, poorly digitized PDFs hosted on some random professor's website. "

" I don't have hard numbers about this, but the impression I get is that the amount of eyeballs you get from being on the humor shelf at Barnes & Noble - it is almost insignificant. "

" 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. "