Randall’s Comments (group member since Sep 23, 2014)

Randall’s comments from the Ask Randall Munroe and Lev Grossman group.

Yeah, thank you—this was fun! Thanks for joining us!

Lev wrote: "I’ve always admired/imitated-on-my-blog your use of alt text. Do you have a favorite? Tips for the writing of Great Alt Text?

It's sort of a trap, because once you teach people to expect it, you have to include it or they get frustrated! On the other hand, it makes people feel a slight disappointment every time they read another comic that doesn't use it. So it's really all a plot.

I don't know how many people actually read the mouseover text (it's hard to get an unbiased sample) but I try to assume that a lot of people don't.

I've had a few What If alt-texts that I've really liked. Like the first one here...

Lev, I have a question: Do you feel surprised by your characters or feel like they're acting on their own, or do you not really think about writing that way? I was listening to some writers talk about this idea, and they had really varying takes on it.

Lev wrote: ... Though my answers are totally unrigorous and based on zero research. And with no drawings. I can't draw.

For so many years, I assumed that was a barrier to a comics career ...

Lev wrote: Also: how much does it piss you off when journalists cap the first letter of Xkcd?

I've tried hard recently to move to a place in my life where I don't worry too much about other peoples' spelling and grammar. I started thinking more about why I felt so strongly about correcting grammar and stuff, and I think a lot of it was my gratification at the reassurance that I know how things work and they don't, which I don't really want to cultivate. I've written a few comics hinting at this. I've heard it said that in the battle between the descriptivists and the prescriptivists, the score is descriptivists 500,000,000, prescriptivists 0.

And "Xkcd" looks kind of silly. I think we're safe from it catching on.

Lev wrote: "C-3PO: Sir, the possibility of successfully navigating an asteroid field is approximately 3,720 to 1.
Han Solo: Never tell me the odds.

Apologies if this is covered in the book, or if you've been..."

The asteroids in our asteroid belt are so far apart that if you were standing on one, you wouldn't be able to see another. We've sent something like 7 or 8 probes through it and nothing happened to them. (Although I think I heard we were definitely nervous about the first one ...)

KEF wrote: "Mr. Munroe: have you ever been really stumped by a question? And, what is the longest amount of time it has taken you to come up with the answer to a question?

I love "What If"."

The one about rowing a boat on liquid helium had me stumped for months, because liquid helium is weird and quantum. When it gets cold enough, you get strange theoretical effects like objects falling through it like without touching it because they're not at the right energy level to interact with it.

These are the things that made the already exciting event of the book's arrival even better than anticipated. (maybe next book the delivery by velociraptor will work out!)

The book is in front of you, and you're paying attention to it (looking for raptors near it), which means you're not watching your left and right.

Alan wrote: "Here's another question for Randall, a bit less personal, but more in line with the What If? format: I read that Los Angelos has completely synchronized every traffic light. Would it be possible t..."

I'm not a traffic engineer, but I imagine there's some minimum separation between lights at which the uncertainty in the average car's travel time is much larger than the light cycle time, and then you'd lose the benefit of the synchronization. Without doing any calculation, I'd guess that distance is on the order of a few miles.

But the idea of synchronized traffic lights makes me imagine that all the lights were actually synchronized—every light had to be the same color. I wonder how hard it would be to get around in that city. I guess you'd probably just leave them all at red and treat them like stop signs.

Alan wrote: "Randall, did you get fired from NASA for, say, doodling on the job, or did you leave willingly?"

It was sort of a mutual parting. I was working on short-term contracts, and they decided not to renew one. They offered to find me a new contract, but I decided not to pursue it.

I never actually drew comics on the job, but I did make an ethernet cable harness for one of the robots, hitched it up to my desk chair, and had it tow me around the building at full speed a charioteer. It's possible that contributed to their decision.

Lev wrote: "I have a lot of questions for Randall but I’m going to try to keep them to a steady trickle.

What’s your position on the Marvel What if comics? I read “what if the Avengers had become pawns of Ko..."

I actually never read Marvel or DC comics growing up! My exposure to comics was entirely through newspaper comic book collections—things like Calvin and Hobbes and The Far Side. The only longer-form comics I read were Tintin and Asterix.

People submit a lot of What If questions about superhero battles/powers, and I don't tend to answer them. Partly because it often turns from an exercise in science to into an exercise in guessing how the author would have resolved a question, but mostly because almost everyone I meet seems to know more about superhero comics than me, so I'd be way out of my league!

Sanasai wrote: "I couldn't really come up with an actual question, but I do want to say I love all the extra details you put into What If?, Randall. The equations and scribbles on the endpapers, the map inside th..."

Thank you! The endpapers are one of my favorite things in the book.

There's a table of numbers near the fold, which was actually a table directly from my notes—something to do with specific heats. It just so happens that each line follows a 3-3-4 digit pattern; this didn't stand out to me at the time.

But after it was published, someone came up to me and said "Hey, what's up with those Colorado-area phone numbers in the front of the book? I called them all and they seemed pretty random."

Oops.