Some of the first infographics I did started off as notes to myself: trying to plot out, for instance, how IP addresses are allocated. After a while, I thought, 'This is a neat thing I can share with people, and they can follow me along in that process of understanding.'

People often say, 'I like your comics, even though I don't know enough math to get all of them,' as if it's some kind of club where they don't belong. But there's no club. There's just lots of people who are excited about thinking, learning, joking, and sometimes overanalyzing things.

A lot of times, the idea of a comic will be, 'Wouldn't it be cool if you...' But instead of doing it, I'll draw a comic about it.

There is a danger of building an identity around the idea of being smart because it is very easy to become off-putting, to become exclusionary.

If everybody has to take biology and chemistry, they can take computer science. Computer science is a more useful skill right now than a lot of other things that people are learning at school.

Our science has become terrible, our research dangerous, our findings deadly. We physicists have to make peace with reality. Reality is not as strong as we are. We will ruin reality.

I say the sweet science is to understand not only how to fight coming forward, how to be a big puncher, but also understand, if you run into a guy who can take your punch for the first time, how to react.

There is nothing that living things do that cannot be understood from the point of view that they are made of atoms acting according to the laws of physics.