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Comment by eykanal | Hacker News Reader

This is what makes Munroe so awesome. It's one thing to be able to make nerd comics. It's another thing to put in the effort to make accurate time/location maps of various movies [1], or attempt to explain money with all sorts of relative comparisons [2], or think up weird google searches and show the results [3]. It's a completely different league to execute on huge projects like this in such a novel fashion (as well as the "umwelt" one [4] which showed one of fifty different comics to the reader, depending on their location) that make Munroe so unique.

[1]: http://xkcd.com/657/

[2]: http://xkcd.com/980/

[3]: http://xkcd.com/887/

[4]: http://xkcd.com/1037/

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Also see his fantastic "What if?" series[0] where he answers fantastical questions using similar research. Examples of recent questions include "If you call a random phone number and say “God bless you”, what are the chances that the person who answers just sneezed?" and "What place on Earth would allow you to freefall the longest by jumping off it?"

[0] http://what-if.xkcd.com/

Also great - the @WhatIfNumbers twitter feed: https://twitter.com/whatifnumbers

Speaking of What-if, it now makes sense that he did the questions about what it would be like if the oceans of Earth were drained [0], and what it would look like on Mars if suddenly water were added and oceans (an ocean) formed [1].

--------------------

[0] http://what-if.xkcd.com/53/

[1] http://what-if.xkcd.com/54/

What if a diamond 100ft in diameter hits Earth in near-light speed?

http://what-if.xkcd.com/20/

still hoping he'll tackle my question about what would happen if humans became 2nd most intelligent species on earth (perhaps to.. dolphins) and how that would play out :)

The "umwelt" comic was even more complicated than that. It had different versions based on:

* location (getting surprisingly specific sometimes)

* browser

* what plugins work/don't work in your browser

* referrer (what you clicked on to arrive at the comic)

* operating system

* screen size

* browser window size

* hostname domain (i.e. you're at work, and your company's domain)

* hostname TLD (i.e. your computer's ISP is .net, .mil, etc)

Here are different compilations of the variations he created:

http://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php?title=1037:_Umwelt

http://imgur.com/a/faLz2

I'm not nitpicking, just helping demonstrate how far Randall went in that creation.

>"what plugins work/don't work in your browser" //

How'd he do that?

The panopticlick paper, https://panopticlick.eff.org/browser-uniqueness.pdf, suggests a JavaScript library called PluginDetect, http://www.pinlady.net/PluginDetect/

To me, one of the all-time great geek moments was when Munroe did a tech talk at Google, and Don Knuth gets up to ask him if he's thought about doing animated cartoons, and what is his favorite log log n sorting algorithm, about 21:30 in to this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zJOS0sV2a24

Every good comic author does that. Read up any of many of will eisner's instructional books on comics.

Also, it's a very cheap shot to get nerds, as every nerd is found of this. This is the characteristic in writing/playing RPG stories that i like the most. Thinking of the backstory for every single little thing.

He's also my winner in the "you'll never guess what college he went to" contest. It's a college in my state from which my college roommate transferred, and it still would have been my last guess.

That's just a touch snobbish, don't you think?

May totally be "snobbish" but CNU is a weird place for him to have gone, from a variety of perspectives.

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