The explosion would be just the right size to maximize the amount of paperwork your lab would face. If the explosion were smaller, you could potentially cover it up. If it were larger, there would be no one left in the city to submit paperwork to.
There are so many adventures that you miss because you’re waiting to think of a plan. To find them, look for tiny interesting choices. And remember that you are always making up the future as you go.
The scholarly authorities on freezing to death seem to be, unsurprisingly, Canadians.
You don’t become great by trying to be great. You become great by wanting to do something, and then doing it so hard that you become great in the process.
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.
Space is about 100 kilometers away. That’s far away – I wouldn’t want to climb a ladder to get there – but it isn’t that far away. If you’re in Sacramento, Seattle, Canberra, Kolkata, Hyderabad, Phnom Penh, Cairo, Beijing, central Japan, central Sri Lanka, or Portland, space is closer than the sea.
I’ve always thought that one of the the great thing about physics is that you can add more digits to any number and see what happens and nobody can stop you.
A million people can call the mountains a fiction, yet it need not trouble you as you stand atop them.
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.
I read comics and I did science, and never really put them together until I accidentally found myself in the middle of one.
Take wrong turns. Talk to strangers. Open unmarked doors. And if you see a group of people in a field, go find out what they are doing. Do things without always knowing how they’ll turn out. You’re curious and smart and bored, and all you see is the choice between working hard and slacking off. There are so many adventures that you miss because you’re waiting to think of a plan. To find them, look for tiny interesting choices. And remember that you are always making up the future as you go.
There’s no material safety data sheet for astatine. If there were, it would just be the word “NO” scrawled over and over in charred blood.
I got in touch with a friend of mine who works at a research reactor, and asked him what he thought would happen to someone who tried to swim in their radiation containment pool. “In our reactor?” He thought about it for a moment. “You’d die pretty quickly, before reaching the water, from gunshot wounds.
They say there are no stupid questions. That’s obviously wrong; I think my question about hard and soft things, for example, is pretty stupid. But it turns out that trying to thoroughly answer a stupid question can take you to some pretty interesting places.
Your plane would fly pretty well, except it would be on fire the whole time, and then it would stop flying, and then stop being a plane.
Do not try any of this at home. The author of this book is an Internet cartoonist, not a health or safety expert. He likes it when things catch fire or explode, which means he does not have your best interests in mind. The publisher and the author disclaim responsibility for any adverse effects resulting, directly or indirectly, from information contained in this book.
Remember: I am a cartoonist. If you follow my advice on safety around nuclear materials, you probably deserve whatever happens to you.
It’s not the fall that kills you, it’s the sudden stop at the end.
Maybe civilization will collapse, we’ll all succumb to disease and famine, and the last of us will be eaten by cats. Maybe we’ll all be killed by nanobots hours after you read this sentence. There’s no way to know.
A world of random soul mates would be a lonely one. Let’s hope that’s not what we live in.