Randall Munroe Quotes & Sayings

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. — Randall Munroe

But maybe it won't. Maybe it will take on a role like the TCP protocol, where it becomes a piece of infrastructure on which other things are built, and has the inertia of consensus. — Randall Munroe

REENTERING SPACECRAFT HEAT UP because they're compressing the air in front of them (not, as is commonly believed, because of air friction). — Randall Munroe

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. — Randall Munroe

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. — Randall Munroe

Some species moved north faster than others; when Europeans arrived in New England, earthworms had not yet returned. As the ice sheets withdrew, large chunks of ice broke off and were left behind. When these chunks melted, they left behind water-filled depressions in the ground called kettlehole ponds. Oakland Lake, near the north end of Springfield Boulevard in Queens, is one of these kettlehole ponds. The ice sheets also dropped boulders they'd picked up on their journey; some of these rocks, called glacial erratics, can be found in Central Park today. — Randall Munroe

Sometimes I mistake this for a universe that cares. — Randall Munroe

High up in the North in the land called Svithjod, there stands a rock. It is a hundred miles high and a hundred miles wide. Once every thousand years a little bird comes to this rock to sharpen its beak. When the rock has thus been worn away, then a single day of eternity will have gone by. - Hendrik Willem Van Loon — Randall Munroe

People often wonder whether we could harvest electrical power from lightning. — Randall Munroe

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. — Randall Munroe

If 10 percent of them are close to your age, that would be around 50,000 people in a lifetime. Given that you have 500,000,000 potential soul mates, it means you would find true love only in one lifetime out of 10,000. — Randall Munroe

Actually, what I'm confused about is how. — Randall Munroe

Magnitude -15 A drifting mote of dust coming to rest on a table Sometimes it's nice not to destroy the world for a change. — Randall Munroe

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.' — Randall Munroe

This is true of any device that uses power, which is a handy thing to know. For example, people worry about leaving disconnected chargers plugged into the wall for fear that they're draining power. Are they right? Heat flow analysis provides a simple rule of thumb: If an unused charger isn't warm to the touch, it's using less than a penny of electricity a day. For a small smartphone charger, if it's not warm to the touch, it's using less than a penny a year. This is true of almost any powered device. — Randall Munroe

A million people can call the mountains a fiction, yet it need not trouble you as you stand atop them. — Randall Munroe

The most common genetic disorder caused by inbreeding is spinal muscular atrophy (SMA). SMA causes the death of the cells in the spinal cord, and is often fatal or severely disabling. — Randall Munroe

If you set out a cup of warm water on Mars, it'll try to boil, freeze, and sublimate, practically all at once. Water on Mars seems to want to be in any state except liquid. — Randall Munroe

I still don't know whether there are more hard or soft things in the world, — Randall Munroe

If people had wheels and could fly, how would we differentiate them from airplanes? - Anonymous — Randall Munroe

That's one in 27 quinquatrigintillion. — Randall Munroe

By choosing the right words, you can take an idea that's happening in your head and try to make an idea like it happen in someone else's. That's what's happening right now. — Randall Munroe

Plumes of hot meat and bubbles of trapped gases like methane - along with the air from the lungs of the deceased moles - would periodically rise through the mole crust and erupt volcanically from the surface, a geyser of death blasting mole bodies free of the planet. — Randall Munroe

A world of random soul mates would be a lonely one. Let's hope that's not what we live in. — Randall Munroe

Child from a parent who self-fertilized would be like a clone of the parent with severe genetic damage. The parent would have all the genes the child would, but the child wouldn't have all the genes — Randall Munroe

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.' — Randall Munroe

A. Nearly everyone would die. Then things would get interesting. — Randall Munroe

Thin Burning Light Gun
If the car found life, it could try to use this gun to learn about it, but the life might not be alive when it was done. — Randall Munroe

News networks giving a greater voice to viewers because the social web is so popular are like a chef on the Titanic who, seeing the looming iceberg and fleeing customers, figures ice is the future and starts making snow cones. — Randall Munroe

Hockey players can also brace pretty hard against the ice. A player skating at full speed can stop in the space of a few meters, which means the force they're exerting on the ice is pretty substantial. (It also suggests that if you started to slowly rotate a hockey rink, it could tilt up to 50 degrees before the players would all slide to one end. Clearly, experiments are needed to confirm this.) — Randall Munroe

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. — Randall Munroe

Telescopes and bathyscapes and sonar probes of Scottish lakes, Tacoma Narrows bridge collapse explained with abstract phase-space maps, some x-ray slides, a music score, Minard's Napoleonic war: the most exciting new frontier is charting what's already here. — Randall Munroe

I'm not sure why we romanticize 'young love,' or love in general ... It just leads to the idea that either your love is pure, perfect and eternal, and you are storybook-compatible in every way with no problems, or you're LYING when you say 'I love you. — Randall Munroe

Mutations pop up all over the place, but our redundant chromosomes help blunt this effect. By avoiding inbreeding, a population reduces the odds that rare and harmful mutations will pop up at the same place on both sides of the chromosome. — Randall Munroe

Horned lizards shoot jets of blood from their eyes for distances of up to 5 feet. I don't know why they do this because whenever I reach the phrase "shoot jets of blood from their eyes" in an article I just stop there and stare at it until I need to lie down. — Randall Munroe

If humans escape the solar system and outlive the Sun, our descendants may someday live on one of these planets. Atoms from Times Square, cycled through the heart of the Sun, will form our new bodies. One day, either we will all be dead, or we will all be New Yorkers. — Randall Munroe

What if every day, every human had a 1 percent chance of being turned into a turkey, and every turkey had a 1 percent chance of being turned into a human? — Randall Munroe

Could you boil tea if you just stirred it hard enough? No. The first problem is power. The amount of power in question, 700 watts, is about a horsepower, so if you want to boil tea in two minutes, you'll need at least one horse to stir it hard enough. — Randall Munroe

To occasional heat waves - ice in the Martian soil occasionally melts and flows as a liquid. — Randall Munroe

THE RICHTER SCALE, WHICH has technically been replaced by the "moment magnitude"1 scale, measures the energy released by an earthquake. — Randall Munroe

This means the last few years of hard-drive production - which, thanks to increasing size, represents the majority of global storage capacity - would just about fill an oil tanker. So, by that measure, the Internet is smaller than an oil tanker. — Randall Munroe

Air has very little viscosity. That is, it's not gooey. That means things flying through the air experience drag because of the momentum of the air they're shoving out of the way - not from cohesion between the air molecules. It's more like pushing your hand through a bathtub full of water than a bathtub full of honey. — Randall Munroe

Two magnitude 9+ earthquakes this century both altered the length of the day by a tiny fraction of a second. — Randall Munroe

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. — Randall Munroe

The whole process of claiming a colony (on land already occupied by other people) is awfully arbitrary in the first place. Essentially, the British built their empire by sailing around and sticking flags on random beaches. — Randall Munroe

Plausible that a professional pitcher with some time to practice could throw a golf ball faster than a baseball. — Randall Munroe

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. — Randall Munroe

Given all the stress and pressure, some people would fake it. They'd want to join the club, so they'd get together with another lonely person and stage a fake soul mate encounter. They'd marry, hide their relationship problems, and struggle to present a happy face to their friends and family. — Randall Munroe

Your brain - not accustomed to nonuniform gravities - thinks you're standing on a gentle slope. — Randall Munroe

You don't use science to show you're right, you use science to become right. — Randall Munroe

If every human somehow simply disappeared from the face of the Earth, how long would it be before the last artificial light source would go out? — Randall Munroe

I never trust anyone who's more excited about success than about doing the thing they want to be successful at. — Randall Munroe

To DNA, our most complex programming projects are like pocket calculators. — Randall Munroe

This would be something never before seen in the history of the universe: an underground shooting star. — Randall Munroe

Things are rarely just crazy enough to work, but they're frequently just crazy enough to fail hilariously. — Randall Munroe

On to the sixth row! No matter how careful you are, the sixth row would definitely kill you. — Randall Munroe

I like it when things catch fire and explode, which means I do not have your best interests in mind. — Randall Munroe

The universe is probably littered with the one-planet graves of cultures which made the sensible economic decision that there's no good reason to go into space - each discovered, studied, and remembered by the ones who made the irrational decision. — Randall Munroe

If at first you don't succeed, that's one data point. — Randall Munroe

Falling from great heights is dangerous.[citation needed] A balloon could — Randall Munroe

GPS timing is incredibly precise; of all the problems in engineering, it's one of the only ones in which engineers have been forced to include both special and general relativity in their calculations. — Randall Munroe

It makes me happy that an arm of the US government has, in some official capacity, issued an opinion on the subject of firing nuclear missiles at hurricanes. — Randall Munroe

Cook's The Science of Good Cooking was also helpful. — Randall Munroe

For a small smartphone charger, if it's not warm to the touch, it's using less than a penny a year. This is true of almost any powered device.1 — Randall Munroe

But what kind of person makes tea in a blender? — Randall Munroe

Manhattan has been continuously inhabited for the past 3000 years, and was first settled by humans perhaps 9000 years ago. — Randall Munroe

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. — Randall Munroe

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.' — Randall Munroe

In conclusion, if the Sun went out, we would see a variety of benefits across many areas of our lives. Are there any downsides to this scenario? We would all freeze and die. — Randall Munroe

Remember: I am a cartoonist. If you follow my advice on safety around nuclear materials, you probably deserve whatever happens to you. — Randall Munroe

If an asteroid was very small but supermassive, could you really live on it like the Little Prince? — Randall Munroe

As Tim Minchin put it in his song "If I Didn't Have You": Your love is one in a million; You couldn't buy it at any price. But of the 9.999 hundred thousand other loves, Statistically, some of them would be equally nice. — Randall Munroe

We'd end up with a mole planet slightly larger than the Moon. — Randall Munroe

computers are limited by our ability to program them, so we've got a built-in advantage. Instead, — Randall Munroe

In the Clarendon Laboratory at Oxford University sits a battery-powered bell that has been ringing since the year 1840. The bell "rings" so quietly it's almost inaudible, using only a tiny amount of charge with every motion of the clapper. Nobody knows exactly what kind of batteries it uses because nobody wants to take it apart to figure it out. Sadly, there's no light hooked up to it. — Randall Munroe

While researching this answer, I managed to lock up my copy of Mathematica several times on balloon-related differential equations, and subsequently got my IP address banned from Wolfram|Alpha for making too many requests. The ban-appeal form asked me to explain what task I was performing that necessitated so many queries. I wrote, "Calculating how many rental helium tanks you'd have to carry with you in order to inflate a balloon large enough to act as a parachute and slow your fall from a jet aircraft." Sorry, Wolfram. — Randall Munroe

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

The official record for the fastest manmade object is the Helios 2 probe, which reached about 70 km/s in a close swing around the Sun. But it's possible the actual holder of that title is a two-ton metal manhole cover. The cover sat atop a shaft at an underground nuclear test site operated by Los Alamos as part of Operation Plumbbob. When the 1-kiloton nuke went off below, the facility effectively became a nuclear potato cannon, giving the cap a gigantic kick. A high-speed camera trained on the lid caught only one frame of it moving upward before it vanished - which means it was moving at a minimum of 66 km/s. The cap was never found. — Randall Munroe

lightning Collecting all the world's lightning into one place is obviously impossible. What about gathering all the lightning from just one area? No place on Earth has constant lightning, but there's an area in Venezuela that comes close. Near the southwestern edge of Lake Maracaibo, there's a strange phenomenon: perpetual nighttime thunderstorms. There — Randall Munroe

I mean, I guess it's just me who argues that; but I'm very vocal. — Randall Munroe

That's if everything goes as planned. — Randall Munroe

A 1-watt laser is an extremely dangerous thing. It's not just powerful enough to blind you - it's capable of burning skin and setting things on fire. Obviously, they're not legal for consumer purchase in the US. Just kidding! You can pick one up for $300. Just do a search for "1-watt handheld laser." So, suppose we spend the $2 trillion to buy 1-watt green lasers for everyone. (Memo to presidential candidates: This policy would win my vote.) — Randall Munroe

I have never seen a work of fiction so perfectly capture the out-of-nowhere shock of discovering that you've just bricked something important because you didn't pay enough attention to a loose wire. — Randall Munroe

X-Plane tells us that flight on Mars is difficult, but not impossible. NASA knows this, and has considered surveying Mars by airplane. The tricky thing is that with so little atmosphere, to get any lift, you have to go fast. — Randall Munroe

Lastly, we need to know the strength of gravity on Dagobah. Here, I figure I'm stuck, because while sci-fi fans are obsessive, it's not like there's gonna be a catalog of minor geophysical characteristics for every planet visited in Star Wars. Right? Nope. I've underestimated the fandom. Wookieepeedia has just such a catalog, — Randall Munroe

Q. What if I took a swim in a typical spent nuclear fuel pool? Would I need to dive to actually experience a fatal amount of radiation? How long could I stay safely at the surface? - Jonathan Bastien-Filiatrault A. Assuming you're a reasonably good swimmer, you could probably survive treading water anywhere from 10 to 40 hours. At that point, you would black out from fatigue and drown. This is also true for a pool without nuclear fuel in the bottom. — Randall Munroe

There's a thing about being alone and there's a thing about being lonely, and they're two different things. — Randall Munroe

The Mars rover Curiosity, for example, is powered by the heat from a chunk of plutonium it carries in a container on the end of a stick. — Randall Munroe

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. — Randall Munroe

There were no earthworms in New England when the European colonists arrived. — Randall Munroe

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

Blue-green algae, or cyanobacteria, were the first photosynthesizers. They breathed in carbon dioxide and breathed out oxygen. Oxygen is a volatile gas; it causes iron to rust (oxidation) and wood to burn (vigorous oxidation). When cyanobacteria first appeared, the oxygen they breathed out was toxic to nearly all other forms of life. The resulting extinction is called the oxygen catastrophe. After the cyanobacteria pumped Earth's atmosphere and water full of toxic oxygen, creatures evolved that took advantage of the gas's volatile nature to enable new biological processes. We are the descendants of those first oxygen-breathers. Many details of this history remain uncertain; the world of a billion years ago is difficult to reconstruct. — Randall Munroe

Okay, you can stop looking at your hand now. — Randall Munroe

It's not that the wind is blowing, it's what the wind is blowing. — Randall Munroe

You can work through the physics of interstellar radio attenuation,1 but the problem is captured pretty well by considering the economics of the situation: If your TV signals are getting to another star, you're wasting money. Powering a transmitter is expensive, and creatures on other stars aren't buying the products in the TV commercials that pay your power bill. The full picture is more complicated, but the bottom — Randall Munroe

Major League Baseball Rule 6.08(b) suggests that in this situation, the batter would be considered "hit by pitch," and would be eligible to advance to first base. — Randall Munroe

Introverts understand; the loneliest human in history was just happy to have a few minutes of peace and quiet. — Randall Munroe

The ISS moves so quickly that if you fired a rifle bullet from one end of a football field,7 the International Space Station could cross the length of the field before the bullet traveled 10 yards.8 — Randall Munroe

A magnitude 15 earthquake would involve the release of almost 1032 joules of energy, which is roughly the gravitational binding energy of the Earth. To put it another way, the Death Star caused a magnitude 15 earthquake on Alderaan. — Randall Munroe

What would happen if everyone on Earth stood as close to each other as they could and jumped, everyone landing on the ground at the same instant? - Thomas Bennett (and many others) — Randall Munroe