244 Quotes by Randall Munroe

Actually, what I’m confused about is how.

The lesson: If the optimist says the glass is half full, and the pessimist says the glass is half empty, the physicist ducks.

If you’re in Sacramento, Seattle, Canberra, Kolkata, Hyderabad, Phnom Penh, Cairo, Beijing, central Japan, central Sri Lanka, or Portland, space is closer than the sea.

As Tim Minchin put it in his song “If I Didn’t Have You”: Your love is one in a million; You couldn’t buy it at any price. But of the 9.999 hundred thousand other loves, Statistically, some of them would be equally nice.

IF YOU WANT TO transfer a few hundred gigabytes of data, it’s generally faster to FedEx a hard drive than to send the files over the Internet. This isn’t a new idea – it’s often dubbed “SneakerNet” – and it’s even how Google transfers large amounts of data internally.

Based on the site’s growth rate, and the age breakdown of its users over time,2 there are probably 10 to 20 million people who created Facebook profiles who have since died.

There were no earthworms in New England when the European colonists arrived.

In the Clarendon Library at Oxford University sits a battery-powered bell that has been ringing since the year 1840. The bell “rings” so quietly it’s almost inaudible, using only a tiny amount of charge with every motion of the clapper. Nobody knows exactly what kind of batteries it uses because nobody wants to take it apart to figure it out.

At supersonic and hypersonic speeds, a shockwave forms around the steak that helps protect it from the faster and faster winds. The exact characteristics of this shock front – and thus the mechanical stress on the steak – depend on how an uncooked 8-ounce filet tumbles at hypersonic speeds. I searched the literature, but was unable to find any research on this.