Heard of XKCD?

Before yesterday, me neither. But then my dear sister-in-law put up a post, introducing all her readers to it. Some of the ones she linked to were very funny--I particularly liked the one about the centrifuge.

I wound up reading through pretty much their entire collection.

It's a fairly simply-drawn comic, with most of the people being stick-figures, but a surprisingly high number of the strips induced full-body belly-laughs in me. Some of the strips are poignant, some are creepy, many are vulgar; but they tap the vein of nerd-humor very, very well.

Here are some samples that I liked.


Click on this one to go see it in full size.

This one is really funny to me, precisely because I have written in both Scheme (which is one dialect of Lisp) and in Perl. This comic is so, so true.




Yup. 100% right.



Now, for those of you who aren't hip to your physicists, Richard Feynman is widely recognized as a genius. I like this line from Wikipedia: "Freeman Dyson once wrote that Feynman was "half-genius, half-buffoon", but later revised this to 'all-genius, all-buffoon'." He was involved on the Manhattan project as a young man. Later, he was a professor at Caltech, with numerous discoveries and advances to his name. And shortly before he died in 1988, he was on the panel investigating the Challenger disaster. He was widely seen as a maverick, even as a troublemaker; He was certainly a colorful character. Also from the Wikipedia page: "In Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!, he gives advice on the best way to pick up a girl in a hostess bar. At Caltech, he used a nude/topless bar as an office away from his usual office, making sketches or writing physics equations on paper placemats."

Well, XKCD has a couple of Feynman jokes, which I found very funny. Click on them to go to the pages that have them full size.


And, of course, there's this:


Hope you like these. I intend to go to XKCD on a regular basis from here on....