Airplane Message
Airplane Message
[There is a plane with a banner behind.] Banner: Adriamycin, one of our most potent chemotherapy drugs, comes from the dirt from an Italian castle.
My hobby: Breaking into airplane hangars and replacing the ads on their giant banners with cool facts.
Large banners are sometimes flown behind airplanes to advertise a product or event to a large number of people. Here, Randall suggests replacing the ad with some interesting facts. This would tell people who see the banner something new and interesting about the world, rather than try to sell them something. He presents two possible facts: Adriamycin , a cancer therapy, and Iry-Hor , the earliest human we know by name.
The chemotherapy drug doxorubicin , trade name Adriamycin, is based on a strain of the bacterium Streptomyces peucetius , first isolated from a soil sample taken at Castel del Monte in Andria , Italy.
As mentioned at the title text Iry-Hor was an ancient, predynastic pharaoh of ancient Egypt — no earlier documents exist today.
This fact is also placed at exactly 3100 BC (or BCE ) in 1732: Earth Temperature Timeline . The week after that comic came out improving cancer research was the subject of 1736: Manhattan Project . That became the first cancer related comic since this one, even though more than two years had passed and with cancer being a recurring subject on xkcd... It could be a coincidence, but seems strange that both facts were directly/indirectly referenced within two weeks more than two years later, and there is even a banner in the cancer comic...
[There is a plane with a banner behind.] Banner: Adriamycin, one of our most potent chemotherapy drugs, comes from the dirt from an Italian castle.
My hobby: Breaking into airplane hangars and replacing the ads on their giant banners with cool facts.