xkcd in the NY Times

The New York Times posted a profile of the webcomic xkcd and its creator, Randall Munroe. They titled it “This Is Funny Only if You Know Unix”. I beg to differ, since I don’t know Unix and I find his comics hilarious almost all the time.

Mr. Munroe has become something of a cult hero. He counts himself as among the fewer than two dozen creators of comic strips on the Web who make a living at it.

At Google headquarters, a required stop on the geek-cult-hero speaking tour, he recently addressed hundreds of engineers, some of whom dutifully waited for him to sign their laptops. He said he had only wanted a tour of the place but had instead been invited to speak. The real thrill, he said, was that a hero of his, Donald Knuth, a professor emeritus of computer science at Stanford and a programming pioneer, was in the front row.

“It’s comparable to Bill Gates’s being in the front row,” he said. “I got to have lunch with him. He’s in his 70s, but people he is in touch with must have told him about it.”

Link -via reddit

The image here is part of the latest strip.