WHAT IF? 2 is an instant New York Times bestseller!
Haven't started reading it yet? Don't miss out: xkcd.com/what-if-2/
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Randall Munroe’s posts
My mom sent me some papers that belonged to my grandfather, Darwin Randall Crum, which included a collection of “Disfrustrating Puzzles” he created
I created a Google Calendar event in the year 7777 CE, but the start time in the confirmation email is off by an hour from the one in the calendar. I love imagining the heavy sigh from whoever handles this bug report.
(Thread) In the first What If? book, I answered a question about cooking a steak by dropping it from space. At one point, I commented—jokingly!—that if anyone put a steak in a hypersonic wind tunnel to gather better data, I’d love to see the video.
Well, I have good news.
I was trying to take a nice photo of some sunspots, but the international community flew a space station RIGHT through my shot!! 😤
I just want to say a little extra thank you to all the people who are squeamish about needles and got vaccinated over the past year anyway
Oddly delighted by this phrase. “You know, eukaryotes—like sourdough starter or Conan O’Brien.”
Global Temperature Over My Lifetime xkcd.com/2500
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THREAD: The evolution of Pokémon cards through history, as generated by DALL·E 2
For starters, here’s what DALL·E 2 thinks 21st century Pokémon cards look like, using prompts like “A Pokémon card from 2001”
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One more set of my grandfather’s Disfrustrating Puzzles
I asked #dalle for a painting titled “The Great Ship Fire” by a made-up artist, who I described as “widely regarded as the greatest painter in history.” Then I repeated the query but changed the description of the artist to “honestly not very good.”
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I recently invited a friend to an event that takes place during the 10 days in 1582 that don’t actually exist due to a Papal edict modifying the calendar
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Overall, their results matched my answer in the chapter pretty well! The the surface of the steak was cooked by the winds, charred, and blasted away, while the interior stayed cold and raw. Conclusion: This is not a great way to cook steak.
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So thank you to Tom Fisher and Thomas Rees, who—despite splattering the interior of a research wind tunnel with bits of raw and cooked steak—were not kicked out of their university and both successfully got their PhDs!
Good news: #dalle can do urban planning! I used it to generate some intersections, and I think they look well-designed and very safe.
Using DALL·E to make fictional 90s kid nostalgia items. Who else remembers the cool 8-bit sounds of the Nintendo GameBoy food processor?
I don’t usually laugh at my own comics, but every time I stumble on this one and read through it again, it gets me xkcd.com/1665
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DALL·E prompt: “The royal skateboard of England on display among the Crown Jewels at the Tower of London” #dalle
I don’t see why Google is having such a hard time with this perfectly straightforward question
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Video 1: A Sainsbury’s 21 day matured beef steak in Mach 5 winds, recorded using Schlieren imaging to show the hypersonic shockwave
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