
The Mathematics Behind xkcd: A Conversation with Randall Munroe - ColinWright
http://www.maa.org/mathhorizons/MH-Sep2012_XKCD.html
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alanctgardner2
A lot of his comments remind me of the spate of xkcd-style graphing programs
around here. The problem with trying to imitate Randall with a program seems
to be that he isn't interested in making things repeatable. He's just very
determined and imaginative, and willing to spend a weekend drawing a graph.
The charm of something like the movies graph is that it's incredibly detailed,
but in a very human way that implies an understanding and appreciation of
those works. You could use fancy NLP on a script, but it wouldn't have any
character.

I suppose this is the closest I've felt to understanding the distinction
between art and just drawing.

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tokenadult
Previous submission:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4567065>

(by me, no comments--it feels seriously weird to tell ColinWright about a
previous submission)

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ColinWright
Huh - bizarre.

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ajanuary
> When people look at these comics, they always assume, oh, the guy that drew
> this must have done all that. But for me, I just found a cool way to get to
> the result that skips all that, even if it’s not as general or satisfying.
> People tend to assume that I’ve done whatever the most expert way of getting
> to it is, and so they assume that I know a lot more about the subject than I
> do.

This reminds me of Penn Jillette's comments on magic. Oftentimes a trick
really is as banal as "he practiced that every day for months and months", but
the audience will never believe someone has that much time/patience.

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mistercow
>For example, there was one that involved combining different restaurant menu
items to get a certain total. But because I didn’t know something about how
Perl’s libraries handle floating-point comparison, the puzzle in the comic
actually has a really simple solution in addition to the one I meant, that the
code missed because of this bug. Most people didn’t notice, but it’s always
bugged me.

Oh wow, he got really unlucky, too. It's just 7 of the first item.

~~~
greiskul
He really should have used fixed-point arithmetic.

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thaumaturgy
Why? If I found out that the library that I was using didn't have good fixed-
point support (i.e., "doesn't do what I expect"), and if I didn't need the
values to be infinitely precise, I'd just use a multiplier. It's always worked
well for me in the past.

e.g., 7 * 215 = 1505.

~~~
tehwalrus
Luckily, I've never had to write any database code that deals with money. If I
had, though, I would have insisted on integers where a penny is 1 like this -
it just doesn't make any sense to store an exponent for a bunch of values that
are all the same order of magnitude anyway.

(I assume that this is how "fixed point" algebra works, although what I assume
computers do with floats and what they actually do ain't exactly ever been
similar.)

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jmartinpetersen
This would, however, totally miss the point that a penny actually isn't the
smallest meaningful unit of money used in systems tracking actual money.

Assuming that the order of magnitude is fixed, this is of course doable, but
according to my experience the order of magnitude does not converge.

~~~
tehwalrus
Ah, but it would work fine on a website where you're selling things to humans
(whose bank accounts can't store ha-pennies). I don't think anyone would be
foolish enough to let the physicists near financial markets - there would be
heavy losses on both sides.

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mseebach
I know it's just an off-the-cuff remark, but the last comment annoys me.
Implying that sociologists are responsible for the existence of society is as
silly as implying that biologists are responsible for that of biology.

~~~
lazugod
As discussed in the comments of <http://plover.net/~bonds/purity.html>, a loop
of importance/purity rather than a straight hierarchy makes more sense (or
assuages more people).

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theycallmemorty
He mentions that xkcd is his job. Does anyone know how he makes a living off
of it? Selling T-Shirts and Posters?

