xkcd | Randall Munroe | Talks at Google

Thank you all for coming. This is great. This was the biggest room we could get on short notice and it's great to see it so packed. So, you know, every generation an artist comes along that redefines the way we look at art, you know, so Jackson Pollock did this and the immediate reaction was my kid could do better than that. And then people realized he was a genius. And Mark Rothko did this and people said my kid could do better than that. And then they realized he was a genius. And Randall did this and people said, well wait, actually my kid can do better than. Here's one she did when she was 8. You know, I think it's pretty good. Maybe you guys, afterwards, just think about it. But of course, you know, we don't watch XKCD for the artwork. We do it for the poetry, for the math, the drama, the romance, the originality. You know, they're all so original. Well, not quite all of them. You know, there was one. Those of you who were here two years ago may remember the great fiasco two years ago this week with the signups for the holiday party where some of the records were getting dropped from the sign up sheet. And you know, you may remember. So I just want to say here what a genius he is with this kind of stuff. But you may remember this message that I sent in response to that. You know, I don't want to say anything, but it did show up a few months ago a rather similar. And what I learned from that, and Randall, you probably learned the same thing, is that at least in MySQL the semicolons are not allowed into the input, so that exploit wouldn't work.

We also checked when drop tables was first added, which was something. It was either the late 80s or early 90s. It's been standard a very long time.

Well, anyway, so that's why we. There's accuracy in comics. And we got some stuff for you. So here we got some T shirts. You can see other people are making T shirts. Ellen made you a cake shaped like the Internet. I wanted to give you your very own official Google ball pit ball. Does anybody else want to give him one? Okay, so let's get started. At the end we'll have time for questions and cake. Use the microphones when you have to. But now let's welcome Randall.

Well, first of all, thanks everyone for having me here. I wasn't actually expecting to give a talk when I was making the trip out here. I was just coming through unrelatedly and asked if I had had an invitation to come by and visit. And I emailed about that and said, oh, well, you know, there are probably some people who want to hear you talk here. And apparently there are. So before anything else, I want to take a chance to apologize. I don't know who here works on the Google Maps, if anyone works on Google Maps, but a couple of years ago I was playing with this, I was looking at this website and I'm a big fan of maps and I found there was some group, I forget who did this, but they did a map of London with all the transit times in colors, which the map is this. And I'm curious what will happen if I put the computer under here. Whoa. Hey. It worked. Ok. So some group did this map where they're color coded by time and it shows, you know, how long it takes you to get like here, this is for their public transit system. So here are the stations and so on. And I said, this is a really cool idea and I want to try this for the US for driving times. So I put together a script which would take your starting position and go to Google Maps and just pull up the page. Not using the API or anything, just pull up the page for directions from here to point one, here to point two, here to point three. So I first did this for my neighborhood around Newport News, which is down in Virginia. So starting off in the center of the map up here, and this is how long it takes to get everywhere on the peninsula and over here. And these are transit times in minutes. The idea being I could then convert this into a color map. And then I said, well, this is kind of cool, but it's pretty low resolution. This is 30 by 30. So I started, but I found that there's a time delay. It takes a little while to ping. It takes a little while to get the map back. And I said, okay. To get a good resolution, I want to do I forget what it was. Several hundred by several hundred or ending up with I think a 500,000 pixel map. So I wrote the scripts, split it up across about eight servers and just started them all requesting segments of this map. And that had been running for a little while. And then I went and read the terms of service. It didn't, I think that as they were written at the time, it didn't really explicitly prohibit what I was doing, but it was pretty clear that they were saying, you know, don't do that. And I noticed this when my servers actually stopped getting results all of a sudden. So I don't know if I had tripped some filter or what Stopped working there. But I never did get to finish that map. It occurs to me, though, that would be a fun project, especially if you have access to these systems. You could have a map showing how far it is from Building 42 to everywhere in the country driving. If you're doing it everywhere in the country, by the way, you probably want to normalize it. You know, the time, the travel time divided by the as the crow flies time or distance or something like that. Just so the map won't be just a mountain, you know, fast here, you know, slow, far away. If anyone does that, I would love to see what turns out. So you can just email that to me, I figure. So I've been doing these comics, and people have a habit of acting out the comics. I first I did a comic about Cory Doctorow, wears red cape and goggles when he blogs. And a week or so later he was given an award. And he went up on the stage. They presented him with a red cape and goggles. I had done a comic a little before that about Richard Stallman suggesting that he sleeps with a katana just in case. And sure enough, they sent him. Some fans pitched in together and sent him a katana. He had never heard of the comic. He was very confused. And I decided, okay, this is going to get out of hand. So shortly after all of that, I did a comic about Jeanine Garofalo jumping a motorcycle off of the International Space Station as it crashes over an island with a volcanic eruption and tyrannosaurs. And I said, okay, someone can make that happen. But until they do that, the other thing I want to say is about a comic I've done recently. I did recently, sort of a warning, let's see if this works. Okay. I was playing with one of these, and it did brightness balancing and you could move your hand around and get shapes to appear. And then I ended up playing with the projector for a few minutes instead of being usefully entertaining. So I did a comic a little while ago about programming ability as a function of blood alcohol content and, you know, saying, here's your normal ability. And as you get progressively more intoxicated, drops down. But then there's this spike. And the important thing here is to precisely hit the spike. And as I mentioned in the comic, if you get a little bit off of the spike, you end up with windows me. Now, one thing that not too many people noticed, and I'm not sure of exactly the numbers, but I gave as the bounds of the Spike, I think 0.29 or 0.28 and 0.39 or 0.028 and 0.039. I think that's. Is that right? I love other people know my comic better than I do. So if you take what you can find with that, which not a lot of people picked up on this and emailed me. But if you want to get your BAC right at the peak and if this, you know, depending on what this is, what kind of a delta function this is, that can make a big difference. If you want to get right at the peak, probably in the middle of those numbers, you want to be about 0.13133. Now a related issue is the question of solving the Rubik's Cube. Google. I noticed a while back that as I got, I learned to do the Rubik's Cube a while ago as there might be someone in here who's played with one before. Once you've learned the sequence of steps to solve it, it's not so much a brain twisting puzzle, it's more like, okay, do you remember the sequences? Can you do this faster and faster? So the question is, how much does getting drunk get in the way of that? And I tried this a year or so ago. I have a drink, wait a bit. Videotaped myself solving the Rubik's Cube because I didn't trust myself to take notes accurately. And I found that when I got, I could get, you know, I could solve the queue here. And my time back then was hovering near a minute, but it's now, which, I mean isn't. The professionals are down to the 22nd range, but so I was here at about a minute to a minute 30 somewhere in there. But I found that as I got more and more drunk, my time got worse, but not by all that much. It seemed I could still do it when I was stumbling, falling down drunk. It seems to be a lot more muscle memory and shoe tying. What I found was that I did have trouble finding it and picking it up. And in the last frame of the video I took in the last run, I spent a few minutes talking about how proud I am. Look what I found. I found this cube. I can do this. Now the problem is we didn't actually get any hard data on this. I have these videos, but I didn't document. I didn't do a good job of the science of this. I didn't document how much am I drinking, how much time has passed, what's my calculated bac. And some people decided that was unacceptable. So a couple of nights ago we decided to fix this. So we got some alcohol, some mixers, and a stopwatch. We put together a table, and I solved the Rubik's Cube over the course of a couple of hours, you know, in precise timing. Taking a shot, 20 minutes, take the second shot and start the Rubik's Cube. Take, ideally, just a couple minutes to finish the Rubik's Cube, but maybe later in the experiment, longer. And we. And by the end. So first of all, it was some cheap vodka and random juice. And by the end, I didn't. I was getting toward the middle, and I was, okay, you know, this isn't quite as much fun as it was when I started. And toward the end, I never wanted to see vodka again. Got a little further. I never wanted to see a Rubik's Cube again. But what we did find is that when we got to the point where I refused to drink anymore, my time had gone up by maybe 10 to 15%, but it certainly didn't stop. So that's an interesting result. The Balmer Peak data. If anyone wants to do a similar experiment while working on Google search and wants to send me their data that they get, that would also be pretty cool. Now, for the bulk of this talk, it's going. I just like to do Q and A because I find that's generally the most fun part of things. So, first of. So if anyone has any questions about the comic, you can be formulating those. First of all, I also, I apologized for the Google Maps thing, and I would like to thank you for Google. Google has solved my problem of urination, specifically. Okay, this will make sense. There are men's bathrooms, which have a lot of the time, urinals that sort of stick out from the wall. There's no barrier between you and the people next to you. And there's the whole shy kidney thing. You're standing there and you're everyone. There are people all around me, elbowing in on me, leaning over, staring at me. Which brings us to the Google Labs aptitude test. I don't know how many of you took this. It went out, I think, in the back of Mensa a couple of years ago as well. I was still in college, and it was a bunch of very interesting questions. How would you color some kind of an icosahedron using one of three colors on each face? How many different combinations can you find? Really interesting questions. I think the follow up to that one was, and what colors would you choose? So it was a good mix and I decided to do this test, but I didn't want to send it in unless I had done it perfectly because, you know, man, Google. And there was a problem on there which involved an infinite grid of resistors. I don't know if anyone's here has done this. So the problem was you have a lattice of 1ohm resistors. So each of these links represents a 1ohm resistor. And this goes out to infinity. The question is, what is the equivalent resistance between two points that are a knight's move away? I worked on this for a while, trying to find some, you know, starting with a few resistors and then adding them on and trying to find some way to build a sequence that then could be rolled up into some kind of a recursive call and evaluated in one way or another. And I could not do it. You know, I was stuck. I worked on that for a couple days. Then I went to one of my physics professors and said, okay, I've given up on solving this myself, but do you want to see if we can work through this together? We filled a blackboard with trying to find different approaches to a simple solution using resistor addition. We couldn't do it. So at that point, with these resistors dancing through my head, oh, we can add a layer like this, then another layer, then another layer. Okay, how does that change the equation? You add the terms here. Oh, no, those. So all this down through my head, I finally am like, okay, I need to go look this up. I looked online and there were actually only a few pointers. Someone saying, well, I think you can find the result here in this. So I go to the library, you know, check out the Journal of Physics, a couple of relevant articles, and find this puzzle was only solved in the last 30 years or so. It was solved once in the late 60s with an extremely complicated approach, and then generalized. Someone in the 90s found a good solution to it, which used. Which was a simple solution, by which it means it still used math way beyond anything I had run into. So I was a little bit irritated that this modern physics research problem had been dropped into the Google labs test around other much simpler problems. But the side effect of this is. And I never actually finished the test. But what did happen was, so when I go into a bathroom, you have a urinal here, you know, in the flush, And there will be tiles. So I walk into the bathroom, stand in front of the urinal. People always cluster around me. Why do people. People stand around me and I'll be thinking, oh man, there are these people. And then I'll glance ahead at the grid, and I'll sort of just idly thinking about grid chess moves. Or I'll think I'll look at two points that happen to be a knight's move apart and then start to think like, ok, well, maybe I missed something important. What if you go back? What if you build the grid this way? And by that time I've tuned out everything else and I can finally urinate. So thank you all for that. So now if we can do questions from the audience. I think there's a mic up here. If you can't get to the mic, I can just repeat your question. But does anyone have anything to start us off? Sure. Talking about acting out, do you expect me to apply? So I started writing my first Python code. Okay, so the question is, with regards to acting out comics, should I expect him to be able to fly Now? I started doing Python. I wrote my first Python code sometime within the last week or so and drew the comic immediately after the day when I had written. There's something called Project Euler, which is online and I just realized that. So it's a programming competition site where it has a bunch of simple algorithms, problems which can be solved within one minute with a fairly simple piece of code. And they're fun. It's a good way to practice algorithms. Now that I'm out of college, I don't have those assigned. So it's a neat source and it's sort of competitive. You race with your friends. I just realized that by mentioning this here, I may be dooming my standing. And so I said, okay, I'm going to take this as a chance to learn Python. And it really was this breath of fresh air because I learned programming on old school. It was some DOS C compiler. And then I did Perl, which is a lot more flexible and everything just works, but at least as ugly. And then I tried Python recently and I understand that there are some things that it's not as great for as edge cases that someone was complaining about splits and joins, but other than that, it was just like I can just type the pseudo code here and it works, it executes. I mean, as someone said that if Python is basically executable pseudocode, and if that's the case, then Perl is executable. Line noise. But yeah, from what I hear, it is a library that you can import. You just have to find it from the anti gravity library. You just have to find it in the right repositories. Maybe that's how Cory doctor gets to the balloon. Anyway, do we have any Other questions.

Mike, I'm going to ask you two questions because Ellen wants me to ask one and I want to ask another one. So the one Ellen wants. No, the one I want to ask is, have you thought about doing animated cartoons? And Ellen's question is, what is your N log log n algorithm for searching?

Oh, go. Donald Knuth. Well, it's really an honor to meet you, first of all. So, okay, the second question was, what is my N log N or log log n algorithm for searching? I'm sorry, you'll have to bring that up with Elaine. The other. We're going to move away from talking about searching algorithms for a moment now. No, I just implemented binary search in Python a day or two ago and I was happy with that. And the other question is about animated cartoons, which is. It's something I played with. I feel like, though, if anyone here has heard of Don Herzfeld's rejected, it was one of the earlier viral videos which he actually did as a short film. He's very upset when it's replayed on the Internet, which he thinks it's all resampled and low quality and he wants it to be on a. He has strong opinions about stick figure art, which I can certainly understand. But I feel like if I stepped into animation, he's already done that perfectly. You know, it's a different genre, but I feel like he can stick to that. And as long as he doesn't start doing still stick figure art and show me up, I won't step into animation and try to muddy his waters. But. But it's. It's a very different genre. You know, I don't know anything about animation and how it works. I've watched, you know, I watch animated TV shows and you know, Futurama that we all sort of grew up on. But. Well, I mean, I grew up on it. I didn't see any of these until college. But I still think of it as, you know, sort of foundational parts of our culture, like the Simpsons. But I actually read a whole lot of comics. I was never too into anime, but I read, I grew up on Calvin and Hobbes, first of all, was the first comic that I discovered. And I actually remember the moment that I took this down. I found this book on my parents bookshelf and took it down and I had really never seen comics before. So I flip it over and I say, ok, there are pictures of people and there are words attached. Ok, so they're saying these words. And I remember reading that first strip where Calvin says, so Long pop. I'm off to check my tiger trap. And from then on, I was pretty much hooked. I read all the Calvin and Hobbes strips. I went to the library. I read all of. There's a whole set of comics where I've read every single strip they've published, mostly more than once, which includes, you know, Calvin and Hobbes. There's maybe not Bloom County, Garfield. I really. I went through all the Garfield strips up until about 1997. There was Dilbert, a whole slew of other comics, and Peanuts. Except I'm pretty convinced that no one has read all of Peanuts. The guy did them himself for close to 50 years and doing every comic himself, which is completely unheard of. Everyone who has been doing them that long has a staff at this point. Except Bill Watterson, I'm sure, did them all himself. And Charles Schulz. So he's really impressive. I'm reminded of the anecdote, actually about someone coming up to Donald Knuth here at a party. I think it was supposedly Steve Jobs. Maybe you can actually verify this because on Wikipedia. Now this story is on Wikipedia because I looked this up and I think there is a citation needed tag attached to it. But the story is that someone came up to him at a party, Steve Jobs, although it's occasionally Bill Gates, and said, it's a pleasure to meet you, I've read all your books. And that. He replied with, it's nice to meet you. No, you haven't, or you're full of shit, or something like that. So has this ever happened? I mean, now the thing is, this is original research, so I can't ask you and then put it on the article, but maybe if this is being filmed.

People tell me that all the time, and it might have been Steam, I don't know. But I only met him a couple of times and in each case I was impressed by him. Probably more than he was impressed by.

Yeah. Aw. Well, he says he's been retold the story himself a number of times and that he's met those people. He isn't sure exactly how it happened, but on each of the meetings he was much more impressed by them than they were by him, which. So, yeah, I don't know about that, but maybe that's just Steve Jobs. Reality distortion field kicking in. So the question started out somewhere over by animation. We can wander back there. It's interesting. There are some trains that have advertisements in the train tunnels where they'll. As you're going by, there's a strobe of some kind so that you see out the window of the train one frame, the next frame, the next frame, the next frame, and it makes a little movie. And I knew some folks who will remain nameless who hang around at MIT and we're looking for interesting pranks and we're seeing if they could commission me to do a 300 frame animation which they could then put on cards and tile the walls with one night in one of the tee lines actually and get it so that when you drove by one morning you'd actually see the animation. So that might be the one place where you will see an XKCD animation. I don't know who's going to be doing this or where or what, but it was definitely something I've started thinking about. So do we have another question right here?

How much time do you spend on this?

How much time do I spend on this? Well, first of all, about 90%. There's the theorem that your workload increases to fill the amount of time that you have. And I found that I managed to use up all my time doing xkc, XKCD related things, no matter how much free time I manage to give myself. But the actual comics sometimes take.

You can take your choice.

Now. So is this coming from people who are watching it elsewhere? Are these people in here? Just typing up here? Because that's easier than talking. Okay, well, so as for the time I've actually there are a few comics, most of the time I'll write it and that can take anywhere from days to a few minutes. Sometimes it's like, oh, I'll just be walking along talking to someone and suddenly stop and be like, I need to put an SQL injection in a baby's name. Yes. And that's where the comic comes. And then sometimes I'll spend, I do all the comics at a very high resolution actually. And I'll spend six, eight, ten hours just putting it all together, deciding, ok, we'll put this guy here, have the dialogue here, do all of the arrangement of that and especially when there's any of the comics with a shaded background. There was the one about the guy doing, falling asleep, reading the Lisp book and waking up floating in this space with the blue lights and everything. And I remember I said ok, and now I'll just add some shading. And that ended up taking me close to three or four hours to get it. All right. I'd finish and be like, oh, it looks too dark over here and then go back and work on that. So, you know, I'll Start off with the incredibly rudimentary stick figures and then somehow manage to be perfectionist about that. And so it appears that we have questions coming along here. Okay, if a raptor were to attack me in this room, how would I escape? There is a lot of glass. I've noticed this coming in anytime you have. And if you go back to the source material on Raptors, which is the original Jurassic park movie, there's the scene where they get the door, Ellie gets the door locked. You know, it's a UNIX system. I know this. And she navigates through, locks, the door and then the Raptor, you know, it's all, okay, we're all saved. And then a few moments later, the raptor cuts through the glass. So my big concern has always been glass, that if you can get all the big picture windows, if you can get somewhere where you don't have any of those, you can lock and bar the doors and buy yourself some time. So from here, I'd be basically trying to move to where there's less open glass windows, which means away from there. I see light coming from there that might be sunlight. So probably through there. This is if I were alone. However, it occurs to me that there is a lot between me and any raptors. There is a great deal of flesh. So it's like the old joke goes, I don't actually have to escape the, you know, outrun the raptors, I just have to outrun you guys. So that might be my strategy. I don't know. Well, so a lot of the time I'll just sort of go. I would look toward the ceilings. When I went to school, there were very high ceilinged rooms. But then again, as Muldoon said, they're astonishing jumpers. So that's also a problem. You have to get pretty high up. There are the. I hear that. So as far as I'm concerned, you know, Jurassic Park 1 is the great movie. And then 2, 2 was pretty entertaining. It had Jeff Goldblum and everything. Then three, I never realized that. I never thought that I could go to a movie in which the only thing that happens is that dinosaurs chase and eat people and not be entertained. Because really I was like, I want, you know, I was thinking I just want them to drop the plot and just have an hour and a half of dinosaurs chasing. What I need is a movie. That's an hour and a half of River Tam beating up dinosaurs. Oh, man. What secret project do you hope Google is working on? Do you have any sort of an animation or movie department? Because right now that's taken precedence over anything else that I was hoping that you were. So do you want to do a question from in here? You're right here. Yes. So one of my favorite drawings of yours is the science one. Which science one? And I was wondering if you have ever gotten any negative feedback on that. Once or twice. There's some people who have worn the shirt. It's generally pretty well received. People, People don't tend to, you know, if they see something that bothers them, they tend to just sort of leave the person alone. I did have someone who was on at a train station somewhere, pretty conservative, who said that they had been stopped by, you know, a very upstanding looking mother saying, I'm offended, you know, you would wear that shirt where my kids might see it, you know. And the person said, well, I'm not sure which word are you offended by, bitches or science, but. Generally it's gone over pretty well, you know, now and then I'll have someone who. And this is especially with people from a generation above me who say the bitches and worry about the sexism there. From my eye. Sometime in the last couple decades, bitch has really translated to. It's no longer really a term with strong gender connotations. It's just a. An expression of sort of triumphant superiority. But I think it's really drifted away from its original meaning. People don't think gender when they hear that. At least the people who I'm used to talking to and people my age. Let's see that. So overall that shirt has been pretty well received. Sometimes people write in and say this shirt, it's just insulting to women. How your readers might wear this. But don't. I don't like that very much because I think that women don't appreciate this. And I can always point out, I sell that shirt I think might be the one that we sell to more women proportionally than any other shirt. So there's that. Okay, what's this? How did this get here? This was like two nights ago on a piece of paper. I'm going to talk with someone here. Okay, now we can see. Okay, yeah, here was. So it starts off. I think my best time came 111. So that's after I had had. This is after the first drink had kicked in and I had the second one possibly. I'll have to figure out what the scale is. I didn't type this. I don't know where this came from. So every now and then. And someone had mentioned this. Your comics are so close to my life. Are you somehow spying on me to get all of these things? I'll have people write in every now and then saying, I know everyone says that, but seriously, this latest comic. Do you know someone I know? Are you spying on me? I'm not spying on you guys, but apparently you guys are spying on me. So unfortunately, we couldn't hold the drink steady, and we couldn't. What I really wanted to do is do this with a BAC meter, which I've gotten to play with before. We didn't have when we were doing this. I saw actually last night that one went up on woot.com right after we had finished the project. And so it was a shame I could repeat the project with that. Although I think the morning after I made some resolution, you know, everyone says I'm never going to drink again. I'll probably drink again. I'm not going to do the Rubik's Cube project again. But I don't remember saying any of these things. Wow. Okay, so here's our data, which we'll be putting together, graphing it. I'll probably use a BAC calculator of some kind with my weight and try to work out how much alcohol was in the system and get the best data we can out of this. Then I don't know where you submit this kind of thing for peer review. I guess the. I was going to say, I guess the Improbable Research, which is a wonderful publication. I actually got to just go to the Ig Nobel prizes recently. I think it's something like the 30 something first annual Ig Nobel prizes. But do we have another question? Sure. Hey.

So I think probably my favorite comic is the one where, you know, a girl and a guy bust in on a guy on the Internet and basically they shoot up his computer with an EMP blast.

That. That's the first comic where I've had someone stop me on the street and hug me. Yes, it was. I was gonna ask. I was really like. When I finished that, I was like, you know, I feel strongly about this because I've been in IRC for so long and, you know, this just drives me nuts the way, like, you can come on with. Depending on how gendered your nick is, you get treated completely differently by people who should know better, you know, by people who have. It's been a generation since the biggest, you know, the 60s and feminism and so on. And it's like it's turned ironic now, but they still do it and it's not any better. And so that. And I was just. I spent a long time on that one trying to figure out exactly what, you know, how to say it as concisely as I can in a comic. And I was really worried that I hadn't. That it hadn't hit. That people wouldn't get what I was saying or would think that I was being too preachy or something. But then the response has been great. So.

Yeah, no, I was just gonna ask if, like, all of your female friends, I don't know how many female friends you had, were, like, beating you over the head.

Hey, you know.

No, I'm just saying because me and all of my female geek friends, like, oh, my God, I love that comic.

It's.

It's exactly what I want to do. Yes, yes, exactly.

How did you get to that drawing? I did that drawing, but that paper for that is at home. How did it get on the Internet? Yeah, it's interesting, actually. The first IRC channel. Oh, man. Why am I telling this story? The first IRC channel I hung out in was actually majority female. It was a strong majority female. I was there socially. You know, I had some friends who wandered into this, but it was. So. It was actually a fan fiction, IRC channel. Erotic fan fiction, you know, And I was really. You know, I didn't really read the fiction, but I got to know the people there. They were all lovely people. It was. You know, and then I moved from there into the larger irc, where it's a little bit more gender balanced or gender skewed the other way, which is where I've been lurking since. But it was always interesting. And there's that meme that's going around now. There are no girls on the Internet in various forms, which. It was sort of funny when you joked about it for a second. And then now that it's become a thing, people think every time a girl comes into a channel, anytime there's anyone with a feminine nick, and they make the joke about a girl on the Internet, that's impossible. And the people who use IRC with androgynous nicks in any of the channels where I am just get treated completely differently. And that generally sucks. And I think it's people who really. It's not people who are so much prejudiced as that. They don't know any better. At this point, I think we've gotten over a lot of what sexism used to be, and we're on to a much more modern, refined form of sexism. But I think that. And I feel like we're Actually, at the point now where a gentle reminder might be all that's needed to make a decent change, that's what I was sort of hoping to do with that.

I prefer the EMP canon.

Yeah, well, a gentle reminder is a first warning and then the second warning is the EMP canon. So, next question, the top one. Hey, you said I could pick my own. No, I actually noticed Chris onset of Akwood, did a Google logo at one point, drew it out of the characters. So let's see. I'm going to think about this one for a moment. And I wanted to go down, though, to one of these other questions. Visit the office in Cambridge. Okay. We live nearby. Okay. And we have Guitar Hero. Okay, I'm sold. Yes. So Guitar Hero 3 and Rock Band are both out now. I've been lurking at. Is this ok? So. Yeah, well, Rock Band three and Guitar Hero are about. I've played both of them. The impression I get is that Guitar Hero 3 is not done by the same group. I think Harmonix, like most of them, have left and are working on Rock Band. And then three is actually the one that's a lot more produced by executives and marketing and not quite so much fun. And I've enjoyed what I see of Rock Band a lot more. So I guess that's the one that I'll have to learn. Although I'm enjoying. I don't like learning new things. I don't know. So I've been playing guitar Hero 2 over and over and trying to get all of those songs and I've got some of the modded songs. I've had a wish list for a long time of songs that I wanted to see in Guitar Hero and they got a couple of them. Freebird is a great one. I've also thought that Flight of the Bumblebee would make a great Guitar Hero song. It'd be like Miserloo, but, you know, three times as fast. Put it in your comment. It'll become real. Yeah, well, so people are actually now doing these modded discs, so I need to find a PlayStation that can play those. What I found, I found someone has done another one off my wish list, which is Dueling Banjos, which is like three or four minutes of. Ok, this is easy. And I'd love to play this for someone who's never heard the song or doesn't know it, because it's three minutes of just dun dun, dun, dun dun, dun dun dun. You're like, ok. And that goes on and on and on and then suddenly, oh, God, it's covered in notes. And so I'm hopefully we'll get a chance to play that soon. And I also wanted the Devil Went down to Georgia was another one on my wish list. But that. And that's in Guitar Hero 3. But they've also. They've got all this crazy stuff they're adding in, you know, with. You do this combo to get this thing and you have to play certain sequences of notes and there's, I mean, like lots of that to trigger bonuses and get random things. And it seems like they've complicated a lot more from just like. I just like to play the notes in the original song. It's plenty fast enough. It's hard. That's the challenge I like. It's downloadable in normal form. So let's see. Am I spying on you? As we've established, you guys are the ones spying on me. And what does XKCD really stand for, actually? So I've been using that as just a unique point in the space of four character strings to point to me, you know, I've been using it as my name on every service back, you know, since at least the 90s. And because I got tired of changing my name every time my interests changed. You know, I started out when I was 10 years old and AOL had first popped up and I was on there as, you know, I think I had first Skywalker 4 and then Animorph 7. And then, you know, I pick other names that had to do with like, you know, Red Tailed Hawk 6 or something. And then eventually I was like, I'm tired of having names that point to other things, you know, that identify me with those things. I want to get a string that will just point uniquely to me that's not my name, because that's kind of boring. And I decided to just go through to generate random strings and find one that had a certain set of qualities which included none of the letters could be mistaken for other letters. In either case, none of the letters numbers. So no l because L lowercase can look like I or 1. And it couldn't have any obvious acronym decoding. It couldn't be or be an existing acronym. And it couldn't be pronounceable because then it would sound like words and, you know, it sound like a word and people would think of other words like it. So I and I searched through a bunch of names that weren't taken until I found one that wasn't taken on all the services I wanted. So I've used that to sign up on every service. Except I ran into. I've run into. I ran into one that really. That really bothered me that would not let me Register names under 6 characters. Is it. It's possible. Okay. And then I figured now. But the thing is now that doesn't uniquely point to me anymore. You know, I had this whole idea, okay, I'll have this. This will be a unique identifier for me. It will refer to me only. Like when I Google it, it will only turn up things related to me or occasionally a binary file that happens to ascii. To xkcd. Yeah, when I started xkcd, I remember there were. When I started the comic, there were, I think, something 3 or 400 Google hits for the string xkcd. And about half of those were message boards or things that I had had something to do with in the last year or two. And the rest was data files that just happened to contain the string set into a larger set of random strings. And so I've gotten to track my. The comics progress by xkcd's search results. Climbing. And they jump up and down wildly. I mean, I don't know, it's like it'll be climbing, climbing, and then suddenly it'll drop off sharply to half the size. And I can only assume that's someone tweaking the algorithm because people generally take pages take a little bit of time to fall off, but I think it's at something like 2 or 3 million now. And I noticed recently. Oh, and then there's Google Trends. I don't know if. I don't know if I'm on the search results. What I did notice was after I did the comic recently where I mentioned a couple of. Oh, okay, Right, right here was where I left NASA. Because at that point I was like, okay, this is big enough. I can do this now, man. The comic officially started here. And this is something. I found this on Wikipedia, not sourced or anything, giving me. Telling me things about the comic that I'm pretty sure aren't true. Like that I started it in May of 2005. I'm pretty sure I started it September 2005. And then I put up a few comics. This was just my personal site. Stopped it and then restarted it. Seriously, here. And since then, it's fit an exponential growth curve pretty pretty well. We actually find it fits a logistic curve better. Of the basic curves you can fit it to in visits per day, visits per month. The thing is, each month the logistic curve that it fits is bigger. So I'm not quite sure what to make of that? Clearly we need some more sophisticated analysis and I'm trying to remember this is related to something. I think that's the map of online communities that spike right there. We've had a couple of comics that I put up that just sort of like that. I got feedback within a few minutes. I got some emails and I was like, oh boy, this is going to be another one of those ones that it shows up everywhere. The first one that happened with was the pseudo make me a sandwich. And it just blew my mind to see people who had taken pictures. Probably not in here. It's fairly strict about picture taking. But there was one about. There was one. Someone had drawn it up on the wall at Amazon and it was, I think at Microsoft too. Although I mean Microsoft, why would they be using pseudo? Didn't it come out recently that the. Not recently, like a couple years ago that the server that Microsoft was using to distribute one of the. To talk about one of their server products was actually using Apache. But that's because they were using Akamai and Akamai Apache wasn't really there. Ok. I didn't know what the backstory was behind it. Your shirt is Google and Braille. Yes. Nice. I did actually learn to read Braille at one point slowly. And I had a little card in my wallet. So when I was waiting outside somewhere I would find the Braille signs and just try to figure out basically decoding it like a substitution cipher to work out what each of the characters mean. It's tricky though because normal written Braille does a whole bunch of packing where they'll have several characters compressed into, you know, there'll be one character to stand for common things like th. I don't think TH might have one, but you know, other characters like that, which made it a little bit trickier. But it's a lot of fun. And you can look for discrepancies between the messages that are. That are written and the Braille messages. Like for example, if they say, you know, for help push red button. That was one where I found it. And then I read the Braille and it said for help push 3 inch button. Because obviously you know, if you're reading the Braille you're going to have trouble seeing that it's a red button. And that made a lot of sense. I just never really thought about that. Although Braille is as I understand, fading away now because the Internet and because of computers. It's so cool that everyone can just use text to speech for so much stuff. And I Know a couple of blind hackers who are doing all this useful stuff that would have been so much harder to do even 10 years ago, which is really cool. Now, Question. Okay. Yes. Oh, yes. I'm sorry you asked earlier. I guess I should have worn something brighter. I was just wondering how you feel about Comic Scrapers. Comic Scrapers. I am happy for anyone to read the comic, basically through any means. You know, we encourage hotlinking, unlike many other comics and many older sites. I think it's because people are finally figuring out the easier you make it for people to look at your stuff, the better you're going to do online. And, you know, people say, oh, well, you have to come to the site, you have to register to view this, or you have to pay this minor fee, like publicity and wide readership is worth so much more than any of the things you get out of that, that I just try to set things up so that it's as easy as possible for people to read the comic, to copy and read the comics anywhere, which is the idea behind Creative Commons. I think right now, the XKCD comic directory is publicly indexable, which I didn't have any real reason for that, but I figured if someone finds a way to play with that, to make the comics reachable through another thing, great, as long as they're linking back to the site and pointing to where it came from, I'm happy for that. I know that there's RSS readers that just pull down ridiculous amounts of content and then leave them on your laptop. And I'll do that when I'm flying on a plane. You know, I'll just pull down the last month's worth of feeds from all of these places, and then that'll be my reading material. So I'm happy with any kind of scraping that people want to do. You know, if there's anything that we don't support, we'll look at implementing that.

We have time for one more question. And were you going to do the doodle?

Well, so let's see. It's. This is. This is interesting. Let's see. We'll get another flip in here. I would. So I have this problem that I run into with an effect the comic has had on my social life, which is that when I meet new people, I don't realize always, they already know all my jokes, and I will know nothing about someone, and so I'll be going out and start telling a story. Yeah, when I'm hanging out somewhere like this, I always choreograph these elaborate fight scenes in my head, and they're like, we know. So I've always wanted to see this movie that has. That's just someone fighting for. We'll have someone here who's just sort of concerned by this whole thing.

Here.

And then what can we have someone doing? We're getting to this. Let's see. What is this person doing? So what's another weapon? Oh, we need the nunchucks. Nice. Has anyone played with those rings that are. It's like a cylinder with wavy edges that you supposedly can throw hundreds and hundreds of yards. I've been meaning to try that, because that sounds fun. There are all these kids toys now that actually work. You know, Let's see. Aw. Does it have a launcher or is it just. Was I doing it wrong? Okay. And he is thinking about cake. Let's see. And then we'll see if we can fit this here. Is this gaffer tape, gorilla tape or duct tape? And now we'll have another concerned person here. No, no. You know, what we have here is. So she's been at it a while. So we'll have a dead body. And then he is thinking about. There we go.