The webcomic xkcd has become enormously successful in the year and a half since I mentioned it here. Author Randy Munroe’s mother, Julie, is a reader of this here blog, and she’d e-mailed me the link a few weeks previously, suggesting that I might enjoy his nascent comic. The Virginian has since given a talk to a packed house at MIT, constructed a ball pit in his home, inspired people to play chess on roller coasters, and — based only on a single comic with an encoded message — got hundreds of strangers to show up for a bizarre gathering in a Cambridge park.
Anyhow, Julie recently sent out an e-mail updating friends and family on Randy’s most recent adventure, speaking at Google, an appearance that has won him much attention from throughout the intersphere. For those who are as geeky as me, here ’tis:
Randy was out in California last week and he gave a talk at Google HQ in Mountain View. Google being Google (that is, they sure do things well out there!) the talk is available on YouTube in a pretty good resolution. I’ve seen a couple of Randy’s other talks and this is the best combination of better-quality video/audeo and Randy-on-his-game. (In his game? On his game? something like that.)
It’s about an hour, so don’t worry if you don’t have time to watch. I did a bunch of desk work while it played this morning. Some things of interest (also, don’t worry if you’re not inclined to click on the links):
1. Randy was introduced by Peter Norvig. It drove me nuts trying to remember who he is, and I finally got back to my computer to look him up on Wikipedia, and I found that he’s the author of The Gettysburg PowerPoint Presentation. In other words, one of my personal heroes.
2. The first question referred to this comic, about the programming language Python. Randy found out after the talk that the questioner was Guido van Rossum, the author of Python.
3. The second questioner was Donald Knuth, about 20 minutes in. He is the subject of two of my favorite xkcd comics (this one and this one). As soon as Randy realized that he was talking to Donald Knuth, he got pretty flustered, but eventually he recovered. Knuth referred to the comics about him in his questions. Randy said that Google invited Knuth (who is at Stanford) but were surprised that he came, and Randy got to have lunch with him afterward. He said that Donald Knuth is very tall–even hunched over, he towered over Randy.
All in all, it’s been an exciting time for Mike and me! Probably for Randy, too.
Julie
I tried reading this comic. Between the fact that I’m not a science/math/programming nerd, and the fact that this guy can’t even draw a stick figure, I basically understood about 1 in 10. Well, different strokes for different folks, I suppose…
@james: What do you mean he can’t draw a stick figure? His show *emotion*! And yeah, you might not be in the target audience: Linguists, scientists, programmers, idealists, mathematicians.
I mean that, not only does he represent everything in stick figures, but it’s often not even entirely clear what it is that those stick figures are doing and I have to stare at the drawing for a long time before it “reads” as depicting a certain action.
I mean, I get WHY his comic is appealing… I’m just definitely not the right audience for it (I’m a comics-history-dork, rather than a programmer/mathmatician-dork). Not trying to bad-mouth him, though. His comic just focuses on a drastically different set of things than the things I look for when I read a comic.
I think the point I’m trying to make is that these comics are as inaccessable to me as something like Mark Beyer, Gary Panter, Tim Hensley, or Marc Bell might be to your average mathmatician.
…and as somebody who’s interested in comics, I find that distinction interesting. It’s always interesting to find a set of people who appreciate something in the same medium as yourself, but for a drastically different set of criteria.
Amusingly, one of the best xkcd comics I’ve ever seen isn’t an xkcd comic.