“Basically I’m saying Randall Munroe is … insane.”
I mean, have you seen XKCD 1110?
The collage is made up of 225 images2 that stretch out over a total image area 79872 pixels high and 165888 pixels wide. The images take up 5.52 MB of space and are named with a simple naming scheme “ydxd.png” where d represents a cardinal direction appropriate for the axis (n for north, s for south on the y axis and e for east, w for west on the x axis) along with the tile coordinate number; for example, “1n1e.png”. Tiles are 2048×2048 png images with an average size of 24.53 KB. If you were to try and represent this as a single, uncompressed 32-bit 79872×165888 image file, it would take up 52.99 GB of space.
The comic itself is brilliant in that, when viewed on the XKCD website, it’s limiting your field of view so that you have to pan around A LOT before you can see anything. Viewing the whole thing in through that little window is like that scene in Men in Black, where Agents J and K peer into locker C18…
Anyway, looking at the comic in the static HTML version is better if you’re got the right mouse for it — alternatively, there’s also the zoomable version.
Seriously, it’s amazing. Perhaps the best XKCD of all time.