“Basically I’m saying Randall Munroe is … insane.”

I mean, have you seen XKCD 1110?

The collage is made up of 225 images2 that stretch out over a total image area 79872 pixels high and 165888 pixels wide. The images take up 5.52 MB of space and are named with a simple naming scheme “ydxd.png” where d represents a cardinal direction appropriate for the axis (n for north, s for south on the y axis and e for east, w for west on the x axis) along with the tile coordinate number; for example, “1n1e.png”. Tiles are 2048×2048 png images with an average size of 24.53 KB. If you were to try and represent this as a single, uncompressed 32-bit 79872×165888 image file, it would take up 52.99 GB of space.

via Analyzing XCKD: Click and Drag

The comic itself is brilliant in that, when viewed on the XKCD website, it’s limiting your field of view so that you have to pan around A LOT before you can see anything. Viewing the whole thing in through that little window is like that scene in Men in Black, where Agents J and K peer into locker C18

Anyway, looking at the comic in the static HTML version is better if you’re got the right mouse for it — alternatively, there’s also the zoomable version.

Seriously, it’s amazing. Perhaps the best XKCD of all time.


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