It’s been said that the ideal job is one you love enough to do for free but are good enough at that people will pay you for it.That if you do what you love no matter what others may say, and if you work at it hard enough, and long enough, eventually people will recognize it and you’ll be a success. Because any nerd worth their salt knows what xkcd is.This week XKCD (a popular Geek comic site) posted an epic cartoon called “A Timeline Of Earth’s Average Temperature”.It was a cutesy long godzilla hockey-stick — “scary” to the unwary.

Athletes, nerds, and nerd-athletes alike take the field to create something marvelous.

Matt Briggs takes on the graph Stream: xkcd’s Global Warming Time Series Mistakes Adding together lots of errors and uncertainties will make a nice smooth line. This gives the illusion that the climate was once stable.

The Medieval Warm Period was recorded in hundreds of studies.

My first attempt does not look particularly great but here it is (the font is from \documentclass \usepackage \usepackage \usepackage \setmainfont \begin \begin \pgfplotsset \begin[% axis x line=bottom, axis y line=left, xtick=, xticklabels=, yticklabels= ] % 1st plot \addplot [cyan! white, samples=200, domain=0:6] ; % white background for 2nd plot \addplot [white, samples=200, domain=0:6,line width=4pt] ; % 2nd plot \addplot [red! white, samples=200, domain=0:6] ; \end \node at (2.7,4.6) ; \draw plot[smooth, tension=.7,line width=2pt] coordinates ; \end \end There is a variation of this using R to generate the graphic.

With the intermediate use of knitr or sweave this can be integrated with La Te X to import a very nice version of XKCD like graphics. I am going to use this technique to draw graphics for my statistics class to 'emulate' my handwriting. This has been a topic for a few questions on this site and you can find many examples of such human-like typesetting, the most famous being the great How do I make my document look like it was written by a Cthulhu-worshipping madman?