

and how, for him, The Lord of the Rings helped lead to it all. I recently spoke with Munroe about What If, xkcd, creativity, baseballs pitched at 90 percent of the speed of light. ?" Some of What If's recently explored questions include: " What if everyone actually had only one soul mate, a random person somewhere in the world?" and " If you went outside and lay down on your back with your mouth open, how long would you have to wait until a bird pooped in it?" and - the most recent entry - " If every person on Earth aimed a laser pointer at the Moon at the same time, would it change color?"

Published each Tuesday, the feature - a blog extension of the xkcd site - aims to analyze the kind of wonderful and fanciful hypotheticals that might arise when the nerdily inclined get together in bars: "What would happen if the Moon went away?" "How much wood would a woodchuck chuck. He recently launched " What If?," a collection of infographic essays that answers questions about physics. But Munroe, work-wise, is no longer dedicated exclusively to xkcd.
