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.
Sometimes I mistake this for a universe that cares.
Google owns YouTube, and recently, I drew a comic about an idea for a YouTube feature – which they actually took seriously and implemented. So I’m thinking that maybe we’ll have a future where Google is ‘xkcd.’
You don’t use science to show you’re right, you use science to become right.
Things are rarely just crazy enough to work, but they’re frequently just crazy enough to fail hilariously.
If at first you don’t succeed, that’s one data point.
Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can make me think I deserved it.
Our brains have just one scale, and we resize our experiences to fit.
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.
The universe is probably littered with one-planet graves.
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.
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.