The KSP playing figured heavily into the actual idea behind the "Up-Goer Five" strip and Thing Explainer. "And sort of the more I played that, the more I appreciated just how weird and unbelievable the Saturn V is….the thing that's most extraordinary about is, that was the most practical solution anyone could come up with." "But what I worked on was pretty unconnected to rockets-I was working on robots," he continued, "and they were like robots that were technology demonstration platforms for different sensors they were testing." The personal connection with space came not from his time at NASA's Langley Research Center, but instead from Kerbal Space Program-which, if you're not familiar, is a video game wherein you build rockets to send little green men into space. He's a soft-spoken fellow, with an engineer's habit of rarely letting his eyes rest on a single spot for long-the better to quickly assess the world. "I worked for NASA for a while," explained Munroe. Geeks tend to love supernals, and as the largest, most powerful rocket to successfully fly the Saturn V definitely qualifies for that description, but Munroe's initial attachment to the rocket came from an off-the-wall direction. Thing Explainer's genesis was the "Up-Goer Five" comic, which had Munroe take NASA's Saturn V rocket-the launch vehicle responsible for putting astronauts on the moon-and label its parts using those thousand most-common English words. Highlights include "the pieces everything is made of" (the periodic table), the bags of stuff inside you (the organs and systems inside a human body), and "the shared space house" (the International Space Station).Īrs caught up with Munroe before a book-related talk at Space Center Houston, and he was kind enough to give us a few minutes to talk about space, Up-Goers, and the iterative process of explaining things. The book takes the conceit demonstrated in the " Up-Goer Five" comic-labeling a diagram of a complex machine using only first thousand most-common English words-and goes nuts with it, breaking out dozens of different drawings with a similar labeling style. Munroe draws and releases xkcd under Creative Commons licensing, and makes the majority of his income these days from xkcd merchandise-like his new book, Thing Explainer, which Munroe is currently promoting. It's rare for Ars to stop by a workplace to interview a source where there aren't xkcd comic strips festooning the walls (the " sudo make me a sandwich" comic is particularly popular among sysadmins), and discussion threads on forums across the Internet will frequently include a "relevant xkcd" link to emphasize or summarize a particular point with a comic on the topic. HOUSTON-I'd guess that the majority of Ars readers are familiar with xkcd, the stick-figure Web comic drawn by former NASA contractor and engineer (and now Hugo award winner) Randall Munroe.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |