Good morning, John.
I'm here, at Google, like Google campus in Mountain View, California. It's sunny. And this is not my vlogbrothers video for today. This is me just telling you that in a very short amount of time I'm going to be doing a Hangout with Randall Munroe, the creator of xkcd.
And I'm nervous about this because Randall is maybe one of the greatest science communicators of my generation and I respect him, I look up to him a lot.
Randall has published a book that I freaking love called "what if?: serious scientific answers to absurd hypothetical questions"
Randall's so great about communicating science because it's not about the marvelous majesty of science in and of itself, which, it is marvellously majestic.
Instead, it's about what science and math were created for in the first place, which is to find answers to questions. In this case, they just happen to be really weird questions, like "Could I build a jet pack out of downward facing machine guns strapped to my back?"
The answer to that question is yes you could, but don't.
Or like "how much space would Google take up if it was on punch cards instead of computers?" Turns out, it would cover New England to a depth of several kilometers.
By looking at the world from bizarre angles we get to utilize the toolbox that we have created over the last hundred thousand years of being a species. To know things that really seem sort of bizarre that we could ever even know. And I'm reading this book, one of the great things is that my toolbox gets bigger cuz Randall is so good at communicating how he uses his.
I'm really excited to be talking to Randall, I'm really excited to be here at Google, it's a strange, strange place.
Um, and, uh, but um, you will see my vlogbrothers video, my real vlogbrothers video after that Hangout ends in just a few hours. John, you'll see me then.