Take wrong turns. Talk to strangers. Open unmarked doors. And if you see a group of people in a field, go find out what they are doing. Do things without always knowing how they'll turn out. You're curious and smart and bored, and all you see is the choice between working hard and slacking off. There are so many adventures that you miss because you're waiting to think of a plan. To find them, look for tiny interesting choices. And remember that you are always making up the future as you go.
But I’ve never seen the Icarus story as a lesson about the limitations of humans. I see it as a lesson about the limitations of wax as an adhesive.
I never trust anyone who's more excited about success than about doing the thing they want to be successful at.
If at first you don't succeed, that's one data point.
You don't use science to show you're right, you use science to become right.
You don't become great by trying to be great. You become great by wanting to do something, and then doing it so hard that you become great in the process.
Correlation doesn’t imply causation, but it does waggle its eyebrows suggestively and gesture furtively while mouthing ‘look over there.’
The universe is probably littered with the one-planet graves of cultures which made the sensible economic decision that there's no good reason to go into space-each discovered, studied, and remembered by the ones who made the irrational decision.
Take wrong turns. Talk to strangers. Open unmarked doors. And if you see a group of people in a field, go find out what they are doing. Do things without always knowing how they'll turn out.
Things are rarely just crazy enough to work, but they're frequently just crazy enough to fail hilariously.
A million people can call the mountains a fiction, yet it need not trouble you as you stand atop them.
If 'other people have experiences incorrectly' is annoying to you, think how unbearable it must be to have a condescending stranger tell you they hate the way you're experiencing your life at just the moment you've found something you want to remember.
Our brains have just one scale, and we resize our experiences to fit.
News networks giving a greater voice to viewers because the social web is so popular are like a chef on the Titanic who, seeing the looming iceberg and fleeing customers, figures ice is the future and starts making snow cones.
There are so many adventures that you miss because you're waiting to think of a plan. To find them, look for tiny interesting choices. And remember that you are always making up the future as you go.
Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can make me think I deserved it.
I've always thought that one of the the great thing about physics is that you can add more digits to any number and see what happens and nobody can stop you.
I'm not sure why we romanticize 'young love,' or love in general...It just leads to the idea that either your love is pure, perfect and eternal, and you are storybook-compatible in every way with no problems, or you're LYING when you say 'I love you.
Google owns YouTube, and recently, I drew a comic about an idea for a YouTube feature - which they actually took seriously and implemented. So I'm thinking that maybe we'll have a future where Google is 'xkcd.'
The role of gender in society is the most complicated thing I’ve ever spent a lot of time learning about, and I’ve spent a lot of time learning about quantum mechanics.
I think the comic that's gotten me the most feedback is actually the one about the stoplights. Noticing when the stoplights are in sync, or calculating the length of your strides between floor tiles - normal people notice that kind of stuff, but a certain kind of person will do some calculations.
Sometimes I mistake this for a universe that cares.
When designing an interface, imagine that your program is all that stands between the user and hot, sweaty, tangled-bedsheets-fingertips-digging-into-the-back sex.
What people don't appreciate, when they picture Terminator-style automatons striding triumphantly across a mountain of human skulls, is how hard it is to keep your footing on something as unstable as a mountain of human skulls. Most humans probably couldn't manage it, and they've had a lifetime of practice at walking without falling over.
Space is about 100 kilometers away. That’s far away—I wouldn’t want to climb a ladder to get there—but it isn’t that far away. If you’re in Sacramento, Seattle, Canberra, Kolkata, Hyderabad, Phnom Penh, Cairo, Beijing, central Japan, central Sri Lanka, or Portland, space is closer than the sea.
