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Randall Munroe, XKCD Creator, Goes Back to High School
- coherentpony 11y agoRandall Munroe is not going back to high school, his drawings are being incorporated into high school text books.
- flying_kangaroo 11y agoGood old clickbait titles. Gotta love 'em.
- malz 11y agoI don't see this as classic clickbait (as opposed to, say, "The shocking change at your kids' high school you absolutely must know about") so much as an attempt at cleverness, which is not uncommon for human-interest NYT stories even if it obscures the actual meaning.
- Dylan16807 11y ago> "The shocking change at your kids' high school you absolutely must know about" In that case the superlatives are blatant puffery, and the factual part of the line is accurate. That's not nearly as bad as flat-out lying, like the title on this article.
- jccc 11y agoI think a headline that intentionally implies something false, and more compelling than the truth, is comfortably within the definition of clickbait. Cleverness would let us in on the metaphor without us having to read the article.
- ghaff 11y agoThere are certain patterns of annoying headlines online. However, pretty much every headline written anywhere (online or off) is supposed to be clickbait in that it's supposed to grab you to read the article. And, if anything, SEO probably discourages the use of headlines that are too clever. Personally, I don't see anything wrong with this headline but I get it if someone wants to argue for headlines that are "just the facts" followed by an inverted pyramid story.
- jccc 11y agoThere is exactly no one arguing for just-the-facts headlines to the exclusion of any with style. The objection is to intentional misrepresentation of the story you get after you click. This one clearly does that. Even the example given above ("Shocking!" "You wouldn't believe!!!") is the kind of headline that virtually always misrepresents the shock(!) and disbelief(!) one will experience upon giving it the click it so desperately wants.
- ChuckMcM 11y agoOne weird bread mold that cures diseases!
- brk 11y agoExcellent use of your thinking bag!
- SilasX 11y agoWait, you're saying a mass media publication deliberately chose a title to draw interest instead of to concisely convey what they would learn from its content? Now I think I've seen everything...
- jccc 11y agoHe's doing educational strips to appear in a textbook (just in case you'd prefer not to reward that bait-y headline).
- joezydeco 11y agoNot to be too cynical (but here I go anyway)...but how long before it becomes "hey, instead of a few funny comics, let's do a whole textbook this way!"? Then we continue the de-evolution into a mix of hillbilly, valleygirl, inner-city slang and various grunts. Please forgive us, Mike Judge.
- yahelc 11y agoRandall Munroe has a response to your lamentation: https://xkcd.com/603/ https://xkcd.com/603/
- pepsi 11y agoThe Manga Guides to Databases, Statistics, Calculus, Molecular Biology, etc. are all highly rated. http://smile.amazon.com/Manga-Guide-Databases-Mana-Takahashi/dp/1593271905 http://smile.amazon.com/Manga-Guide-Databases-Mana-Takahashi...
- dragontamer 11y agoThat database fairy really knew what she was talking about. And that's why the Princess was able to join (tables) with the prince. I'm not kidding btw. Its a funny book.
- mathgenius 11y agoI learnt special relativity from a book such as this, in the ninth grade.
- JadeNB 11y agoLarry Gonick's "Cartoon Guide" series (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Gonick https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Gonick) is marvellous for this, to the extent that I'd assume that's what you're referring to–except that he doesn't seem to have one on general relativity. Do you remember what exactly the book was?
- ryandrake 11y agoI'm probably in the minority but I never grokked the whole XKCD "stick figure" thing. I'm not an art critic, but if you're going to put your work out there in the format of a comic strip, wouldn't you try to take the time to draw something more... I don't know... artful? Theres not a huge difference between a bunch of stick figures with walls of text crammed into each frame and simple text prose.
- cableshaft 11y agoHe doesn't have to be a great artist, and the style lets him complete the comics in less time. Clearly his ideas are interesting enough that the comic is wildly popular regardless.
- jandrese 11y agoMinimalism is a form of art.
- duaneb 11y agoIt's a philosophy you can apply to art.
- douche 11y agoSuccessful comics tend to have very little correlation with artistic ability... Take Dilbert and Garfield, for example. I think half the Garfield strips I've seen are the same frame repeated with different speech bubbles. Quantity has a quality all its own.
- jawns 11y agoI think you're going to get pretty heavily downvoted, but I want to try to respond to you as if you're not trolling, but generally don't understand what all the fuss is about. Munroe's technique is a type of minimalism. By drawing mostly in stick figures and simple forms, Munroe is giving you only what is needed to set the scene, similar to a theatrical production with minimal props, costumes, and sets. You get to use your imagination to fill in all the rest. In the xkcd world, it doesn't particularly matter that Cueball has a simple circle for a head, with no facial features present, because Munroe's comedy is not primarily a visual type of comedy. The humor is found in the text, and in the situations he sets up, not in the facial expressions of the characters or in elaborately drawn backgrounds. Which is not to say that the visuals don't matter. They certainly do. Looking at an xkcd strip is a lot different than reading the transcript on http://www.explainxkcd.com http://www.explainxkcd.com. But the way that they matter does not depend on them being drawn in a more elaborate style.
- mr_sturd 11y agoThe next great explainer?
- cableshaft 11y agoIn ten years time: Cosmos, the XKCD edition
- loco5niner 11y agoclickbait title... ugg
- jonahrd 11y agoI'm not a huge fan of the way he explains things with common vocabulary. Sure it makes sense to me because I understand that he means "organs" by bags and it's a kinda nice metaphor, but I feel like some of these explanations are just additionally complex because of the need to work around vocab limitations, and to someone who doesn't already know the material might be hard to follow.
- DanBC 11y agoIt's a useful example to people who need to provide Easy Read documents for people with a learning disability. You can't just take the most used words and hope for the best. It takes real effort to get something understandable.
- TheOneTrueKyle 11y agoYou have to keep in mind that this is also entertainment
- jeffwass 11y agoFor me the concept got old really quickly in 'Thing Explainer' to point that while browsing in a book shop I went from quite interested in buying it to absolutely zero interest in the span of a couple minutes. The constraint of using only a limited number of common words made it feel like I was reading someone's speech impediment.
- Nadya 11y agoI wouldn't read an educational material about how a submarine works, a helicopter works, and a microwave oven works all on the same day. I don't imagine many people would - especially if it were more technically laden in its vocabulary. Likewise - I wouldn't read all of 'Thing Explainer' in a single sitting either. A page every now and then and you don't get bogged down with reading simple language for hours on end. Reading over simplified things gets as tiring as reading overly complex material - because both can be quite mentally taxing. The increased difficulty of reading "eight and one" instead of "nine" gets more tiring than one might think...
- gyardley 11y agoGood lord, enough with the pedants complaining about the title already. We are all adults and know that sometimes article headlines are not exact literal representations of their contents.
- Artoemius 11y agoIt's one thing for a headline to be inexact, it's another thing to be a standard clickbait perversion of the contents.
- peeters 11y agoI don't get why people are seeing this as egregious clickbait. It's taking well known saying "going back to school" and using it in a figurative, instead of literal, sense. He IS "revisiting" high school, in a sense. Most people graduate high school and never look back. Munroe is looking back. The title did not say he would be a student.
- 33W 11y agoAgreed. I like maltz's suggested clickbait title "The shocking change at your kids' high school you absolutely must know about".
- SilasX 11y agoCall me crazy, but I wish news articles would focus more on being information and less on being comics or novels intended to drag you along. Choosing a cute, misleading title over an accurate one seems like the wrong choice.
- onetimePete 11y agoYes, we are all adult excellent phd. prof. experts professionals critical-acclaimed well balanced peer reviewed lotus-effected post-ironic iconic humans.
- ryandrake 11y agoI reserve a few down-votes each day just for people who rag on titles for being "click bait". I mean, really, why is everyone so obsessed with every article's title? Besides summarizing the content of the article (sometimes in a clever way), a good title gets you to click on it.
- cbhl 11y agoGee, I feel like it'd be a decade before a significant number of students got their hands on these updated textbooks with comics inside them, since schools have such long textbook refresh cycles. My other worry is that any such textbooks would be so riddled with errors that it would be undeserving of Munroe's comics -- I got new math(s) textbooks in 4th and 5th grade, and my classmates and I often found errors in the answer key in the back. If the teacher was going off an answer key and had an incorrect answer, sometimes we'd band up and go up to the chalkboard to prove we were right (by showing our work on the board). If there was time after we might even conjecture about the error the textbook authors originally made to get the wrong answer in the back.
- api_or_ipa 11y agoMy professors sometimes would put a relevant xkcd on the last page of our midterms/finals as a small gift. Small stuff like this always made my day in university.
- Chirael 11y agoThing explainer meets thing learners?
- colinmegill 11y agoThis looks terrible