How Many Hard Drives Do You Have?

2min Snip

00:00

Play full episode

Summary

Transcript

Episode notes

"It's surprising which pieces of information turn out to be hard to come by," he says. "To this day, Google, they did send me a whole puzzle with punch cards that I had to decode" But you could have guessed how big the data center would be if it were all on punched-card sized cardholders,. He adds: "You just kind of keep coming at it from different directions until you find something that hems in the answer"

What’s the fastest way to get a human being around a racetrack, if we ignore all the rules of racing? How many pages would you have to read to absorb all of the government laws that apply to you? It’s hard to imagine a better person to tackle these kinds of slightly-askew questions than Randall Munroe, creator of the xkcd webcomic. He collected some answers in his book What If?, and has released a sequel, What If? 2. We dive into how one goes about choosing the right questions and answering them, and how to make it funny along the way.

Support Mindscape on Patreon.

Randall Munroe received a degree in physics from Christopher Newport University, before working for a while at NASA’s Langley Research Center. He is now the creator of xkcd and the author of several books. What If? and What If? 2 are based on a regular feature in which he tackles questions asked by readers.

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.