Scientists on Reddit

Randall Munroe

Cartoonist behind xkcd, former NASA roboticist

u/xkcd ↗Personal account

How we know it's theirs

Listed as his Reddit account on Wikidata; posts about his own comics

We retrieved 16 posts and 1205 comments from u/xkcd, dated 2006 to 2014, most often in r/reddit.com, r/science and r/programming.

Best moment

A redditor wrote in r/pics

On “Al Franken is a Geography God [PIC]”

What an awesome party trick for someone running for the Senate.

u/xkcd replied

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When I was a kid, I got tracing paper and an atlas for the same birthday. So it just seemed logical to me to trace everything in the atlas. This meant I knew tons about geography but nothing about demographics. I was winning the local geography bee until they asked "Which has more Spanish speakers -- Illinois or California?" I figured, well, Illinois is closer to Spain, so ...

Excerpt

More moments

A redditor posted in r/pics

Snake fail

u/xkcd replied

If L is the length of the snake and T is the thickness of its body wall, and the snake swallows up to length S, the snake's growing diameter is given by R=2T(1+int(L/(L-S))). Since the horizontal diameter of the snake-donut…

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If L is the length of the snake and T is the thickness of its body wall, and the snake swallows up to length S, the snake's growing diameter is given by R=2T(1+int(L/(L-S))).

Since the horizontal diameter of the snake-donut (measured out to the snake's axis) can't get smaller than the width of the snake, S is constrained such that 2T(1+int(L/(L-S))) is less than (L-S)/pi.

Say the snake in the picture is 1m long and has a 1cm body wall thickness. This means it can't swallow more than 74 cm of its tail before it closes up completely. At this point it will have swallowed its own tail nearly four times.

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A redditor posted in r/science

The Electromagnetic Spectrum (pic)

u/xkcd replied

Whoa, that's one of my dad's sites. That poster -- that specific one in the photo -- hung above my bed as a kid, and it really helped get me interested in science. I learned so much from it. There…

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Whoa, that's one of my dad's sites. That poster -- that specific one in the photo -- hung above my bed as a kid, and it really helped get me interested in science. I learned so much from it. There are other versions of this poster that are more common, but they're not nearly as good.

The parody mentioned below, xkcd.com/273, was based directly off of it.