The universe is probably littered with one-planet graves

I read comics and I did science, and never really put them together until I accidentally found myself in the middle of one.

The explosion would be just the right size to maximize the amount of paperwork your lab would face. If the explosion were smaller, you could potentially cover it up. If it were larger, there would be no one left in the city to submit paperwork to.

Man, Farmville is so huge! Do you realize its the second-biggest browser-based social-networking-centered farming game in the world?

Our brains have just one scale, and we resize our experiences to fit.

Take wrong turns. Talk to strangers. Open unmarked doors. And if you see a group of people in a field, go find out what they are doing. Do things without always knowing how they'll turn out.

You don't become great by trying to be great. You become great by wanting to do something, and then doing it so hard that you become great in the process.

Space is about 100 kilometers away. That’s far away—I wouldn’t want to climb a ladder to get there—but it isn’t that far away. 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.

If at first you don't succeed, that's one data point.

But I’ve never seen the Icarus story as a lesson about the limitations of humans. I see it as a lesson about the limitations of wax as an adhesive.

I don't have hard numbers about this, but the impression I get is that the amount of eyeballs you get from being on the humor shelf at Barnes & Noble - it is almost insignificant.

Google owns YouTube, and recently, I drew a comic about an idea for a YouTube feature - which they actually took seriously and implemented. So I'm thinking that maybe we'll have a future where Google is 'xkcd.'

It's tempting to just write a comic called 'Everyone Mail Randall Munroe Twenty Bucks' - maybe it would work, and I could just close down the 'xkcd' store and sit on a beach and draw pictures and make snarky Reddit posts for the rest of my life.

There are so many adventures that you miss because you're waiting to think of a plan. To find them, look for tiny interesting choices. And remember that you are always making up the future as you go.

I think the comic that's gotten me the most feedback is actually the one about the stoplights. Noticing when the stoplights are in sync, or calculating the length of your strides between floor tiles - normal people notice that kind of stuff, but a certain kind of person will do some calculations.

Sometimes I mistake this for a universe that cares.