Randall "XKCD" Munroe has a New York Times column where he answers weird science questions

Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/11/16/good-question.html

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There’s a sequence in a SF book I read (Luna, Ian McDonald, I think) where an initiation required a brief unprotected sprint across the lunar surface from one airlock to another. Kind of an extreme version of the naked sprint around the pole at the South Pole research base.

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Aw. I never wanted to see him jump the shark.

Is there not a comic where he explains that?
Bet it has that guy in the hat.

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Amore?

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Pretty sure it’s a rule by now - or maybe Pavlovian to think “XKCD” after hearing the word “obligatory”.

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There’s an app XKCD for that.

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There’s a similar sequence in the red/green/blue Mars books, although it’s part of an insurrection rather than a hazing.

Spoiler: they survive.

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Only appropriate. If there’s one thing about the columns at NYT, they pay way better than honest work. And IMHO Munroe has earned it.

He even has his own time machine. A week ago this past Thursday our physics colloquium [1] dealt with RF comms impinging on – you guessed it – red-shited radio astronomy. The next morning what was XKCD about? Yup.

[1] NRAO has a big presence here, thanks to the VLA.

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Red-shited radio is pretty much all we have here.

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You should have a doctor look into the telescope. Could be something serious

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Like a big pizza pie?

There’s an XKCD for everything.

Literally.

https://relevantxkcd.appspot.com/

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This happened in Artemis by Andy Weir.

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I wondered why he stopped to update the “what if” site. I thought he probably had no time or no more interesting question to dig, probably he was negotiating with the NYT.

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He was also writing his other books. The latest one’s called what if.

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How To

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Eugh. Brain went off the rails a bit there.

He’s also got a third book- the one using only ten hundred words to talk about stuff.

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