Xkcd: Mythbusters and Zombie Feynman
xkcd.com
xkcd.com
They actively involve their community, which goes the rest of the way. If there is a serious lack of rigor, their audience will point it out, and an experiment will be rerun.
Some of Mythbusters' experiments are reasonable enough, but a lot of others are a little too sloppy for my taste, teaching a lazy habit of confirming beliefs by constructing plausible narratives.
Sometimes they'll do a half-assed experiment, bust some myth, and then get viewer mail criticizing their technique. Then they'll revisit the myth, with better controls! This is pretty much exactly how real science works. Nobody does rigorous science because they want to spend enormous amounts of time and money doing the same boring experiment over and over, gradually imposing tighter and tighter controls on everything. They do it because otherwise their half-assed papers will get rejected by their extremely critical peers.
Among other things, rigor costs money and time. People's self-criticism tends to taper off as the deadline looms. This is a particularly important factor in Mythbusters -- my impression is that the Mythbusters folks are exactly as self-critical as their budget allows them to be.
2) ???
3) Karma profit!
please spare yters. take me instead.
I thought reddit is about that, not HN
P.S. Notice I'm not proposing we set no-karma for xkcd.com related entries. Sometimes a thoughtful and non-comical (literally) entry from the xkcd blag is posted.
Today's comic is actually similar to recent posts on being creative and another Feynman quote on good problems. I wouldn't be surprised if the latter inspired today's comic. This means xkcd is part of the serious hacker conversation on the internet.
xkcd != LOLcats
I hate people who think it is OK to put their own stupid quotes into the mouths of famous people to give them more leverage...
brb, got some coding to do. ;)
How do I write "xkcd"? There's nothing in Strunk and White about this.
For those of us pedantic enough to want a rule, here it is: The preferred form is "xkcd", all lower-case. In formal contexts where a lowercase word shouldn't start a sentence, "XKCD" is an okay alternative. "Xkcd" is frowned upon.
When The Feynman Lectures were published, a picture of him playing the bongos appeared in the preface. Feynman was a bit mystified as to why they used that picture, but he let it slide.
A few years later, a Swedish publisher wanted to use the bongo photo in an encyclopedia article about him. Feynman was pretty upset by this, saying:
"The fact that I beat a drum has nothing to do with the fact that I do theoretical physics. Theoretical physics is a human endeavor, one of the higher developments of human beings - and this perpetual desire to prove that people are human by showing that they do other things that a few other humans do (like playing bongo drums) is insulting to me.
I am human enough to tell you to go to hell." (letter to Tord Pramberg, 4 January 1967)
Both pretty cool.