Randall Munroe left NASA in 2005 to start up his hugely popular site XKCD 'a web comic of romance, sarcasm, math and language' which offers a witty take on the world of science and geeks. It now has 600,000 to a million page hits daily. Every now and then, Munroe would get emails asking him to arbitrate a science debate. 'My friend and I were arguing about what would happen if a bullet got struck by lightning, and we agreed that you should resolve it . . . ' He liked these questions so much that he started up What If.
Parts of this book went over my head, but I still enjoyed it alot. It is a love letter to science and curiousity, answering questions I never knew I had.
My one problem with this book is the "weird and worrying questions"-sections, as it at times points fun at the questions, and other times just serve as unanswered interesting questions. Where is the fun in that?
I ended up getting the UK version of this, which had a fun preface explaining its use of units. I still would have preferred the metric system.
The second time around for me for most of the essays, as I read them when they were published on the web. But still funny. And thought-provoking, in a weird way.
A collection of Randall Munroe's answers to "what if" questions submitted to his website. Munroe is the cartoonist who makes the xkcd cartoon and a former NASA roboticist. Included are the answers to "What would be the outcome of a magnitude 15 earthquake?" and "If you suddenly began rising at 1 foot per second, how exactly would you die?". The author's works have a pleasant nerd-like/adolescent/whimsical quality, plus you can learn some physics, and the meaning of the word apricity. The hardbound book from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt is unusually well-designed and printed.
This book is the ur-nerd tome. There is no pretending: you either are the sort of person who is mathy enough, physics and astronomy-obsessed enough and all around nerdy enough to find this fun...or you aren't.
To give an example, most days, because I'm busy being a doctor, I spend a lot of time pretending that I'm not a nerd. But recently, I joined a lab where my boss is about as nerdy as I am. So comparing weekend notes, he says: I spent the weekend solving a Rubik's cross. And I said: I spent the weekend reading the new What If XKCD book. I won that competition.
To be honest, I'm not particularly motivated to write much of a review: if you're that nerdy of a person, you've read the webpage version of what-if xkcd and understand the joy that is Fermi Problems (and probably the annoyance that happens …
This book is the ur-nerd tome. There is no pretending: you either are the sort of person who is mathy enough, physics and astronomy-obsessed enough and all around nerdy enough to find this fun...or you aren't.
To give an example, most days, because I'm busy being a doctor, I spend a lot of time pretending that I'm not a nerd. But recently, I joined a lab where my boss is about as nerdy as I am. So comparing weekend notes, he says: I spent the weekend solving a Rubik's cross. And I said: I spent the weekend reading the new What If XKCD book. I won that competition.
To be honest, I'm not particularly motivated to write much of a review: if you're that nerdy of a person, you've read the webpage version of what-if xkcd and understand the joy that is Fermi Problems (and probably the annoyance that happens after you do a Fermi problem and you spend the rest of the day unable to stop doing Fermi problems), absurd questions about nuclear physics, random statistics and clever stick-figure illustrations.
The key points are these: I religiously read What If XKCD every week, and have read every single one published on the web. The book still had plenty of new things that I had never seen before. There are some extras in the book: one line answers to particularly weird questions. I was anticipating a major drawback of the book to be the loss of hover text and footnotes that appear in the online version; this is replaced by captions and the old-school form of footnotes (i.e. footnotes). However, this is not a great book to read far apart from the internet: it's impossible to get through the whole thing without having strong compulsions to google side questions.
P.S. The worst part of this book is in the acknowledgements when he says he already has an expert on genetics. Note to self: scheme to take out previous genetics expert and become Randall Munroe's personal brilliant geneticist...
What if you took some completely ridiculous scenarios and then did serious scientific research on how they would work. You would end up with this book. Enjoyable reading and you might just learn a thing or two.
Entertaining book with an interesting premise (from the cover): serious scientific answers to absurd hypothetical questions.
Munroe's writing style appeals to me, and it comes across well in this book. Good light reading, aside from the occasional mathematical equation which made my eyes glaze over. Fortunately, those equations simply support what he's saying, and it's not necessary to understand them to understand what he's saying.
