It’s both good science – it really does show how the rocket works – and funny, partly because of the limitations and bathos of the language. One of XKCD’s most popular strips was titled “Up-Goer Five” a diagram of the 1960s Saturn V rocket explained in simple terms. Of course, explaining jokes is a task fraught with danger, but here goes. Part of the point is that you learn a little. If that all seems a bit challenging, there is even an “ Explain XKCD” site, which walks you through the science, technology or general knowledge needed to “get” each of Munroe’s jokes. There are comic strips with mathematical symbols, strips containing programming code, strips where you really need to know what a “clockwise polar plot” is to understand the joke. It’s delightful, good-humoured and never talks down to its readers the opposite, if anything. (The name, incidentally, is simply a set of letters that don’t appear in any English words in that order, so are easy to Google.) Drawn in a simple, elegant and clean style, it tells jokes for people who know something about science and maths. XKCD, the “webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math and language” written for the past 10 years by Randall Munroe, is a geek phenomenon.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |