William Hampton

“If we look at a polka-dot shirt with dots 5 centimeters apart, then we can use the visibility distance formula to calculate that if you see the shirt from more than 200 meters away, the individual dots won’t be visible and it will look like the fabric is a solid color.”
― Randall Munroe, What If? 2: Additional Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions

“in human populations, 60 percent of humans who had any children at all ended up in the family tree permanently, and 73 percent of people who survived to adulthood had children.”
― Randall Munroe, What If? 2: Additional Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions

“In 1956, oceanographer Henry Stommel suggested that, because of differences in temperature and salinity between the surface and the deep ocean, if you connect the surface and the deep ocean with a tube and push water through it, it might continue flowing indefinitely.”
― Randall Munroe, What If? 2: Additional Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions

“You’d also run into problems scaling up the retina—if you made the individual cells bigger, they’d no longer be able to detect visible light wavelengths.”
― Randall Munroe, What If? 2: Additional Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions