Just finished reading What If? Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions by Randall Munroe, creator of the xkcd comic. My next post will be the book review, but since I won’t have time to complete it before this post it due, I want to give you some background about the comic and the author.
If your Facebook friends are anything like mine, you’d seen xkcd comics before. xkcd is a “webcomic about romance, sarcasm, math, and language. The art is basic, often featuring faceless characters, but the level of detail and research that goes into the more complex panels is mind-boggling. Though I understand most of the humor, some of it is over my head, yet I was still surprised to discover Munroe is a former NASA roboticist with an asteroid named after him.
This is one of my favorites:
What If? explores the answers to questions such as “From what height would you need to drop a steak for it to be cooked when it hit the ground?” and “What would happen if you made a periodic table out of cube-shaped bricks, where each brick was made of the corresponding element?”
There’s also some “Weird (and worrying) questions from the what if? [submission box]” interspersed. Each has a cartoon answer varying in response from “Thank you, Shelby, for my new recurring nightmare,” and the stick figure calling the police.
You have all of that and more to look forward to from my post coming up on Friday.
-Eliabeth