When I worked an office job many (...many) years ago, I had a small group of two or three friends with whom I used to shoot the breeze with via email (in the beforetime before office-wide messaging apps became all the rage) all day. Inbetween mundane office gossip, I'd occasionally posit random hypothetical questions, and my friends were, well, friend enough to indulge me most of the time. The number of staples to fill a cubicle, how many staplers to stack to the ceiling, whether Spiderman or Batman would win in a fight, things like that. There never was any satisfactory/conclusive answer to any of them, but the resulting discussion was often rewarding in itself.

This book feeds that "I wonder..." voice in my head that never really shuts up. I'm a big science nerd, and I love all the math and science and logic used to come up with the solid conclusions to these random questions that I never knew I had. How much Force power can Yoda output? How high can a human throw something? How quickly would the oceans drain if a circular portal 10 meters in radius leading into space were created at the bottom of Challenger Deep? You know, reasonable questions like that. The answers are surprising in some cases, and I walked away with random factoids about Pangaea/Rodinia, the Oxford Bell, the Wow! signal, a dude who flew over Los Angeles using a lawn chair and weather balloons, and the Pitcairn Islands.

I also loved the inclusion of so many XKCD-style graphics within the chapters (you know, because the XKCD guy is the one who wrote this). All of them were fantastic and really drove the point home in most cases. Highly recommend picking up a print copy of this book instead of listening to the audiobook version, for the drawings alone.