Book Review: What If? By Randal Munroe

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What if?
Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions

by Randal Munroe

genre: non-fiction, humor

Synopsis from Goodreads

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’s had over a billion page hits to date. A year ago Munroe set up a new section – What If – where he tackles a series of impossible questions: If your cells suddenly lost the power to divide, how long would you survive? How dangerous is it, really, in a pool in a thunderstorm? If we hooked turbines to people exercising in gyms, how much power could we produce? What if everyone only had one soulmate? From what height would you need to drop a steak to ensure it was cooked by the time it reached the ground? What would happen if the moon went away? This book gathers together the best entries along with lots of new gems. From The Lord of the Rings, Star Trek and the songs of Tim Minchin, through chemistry, geography and physics, Munroe leaves no stone unturned in his quest for knowledge. And his answers are witty and memorable and studded with hilarious cartoons and infographics. Far more than a book for geeks, WHAT IF explains the laws of science in operation in a way that every intelligent reader will enjoy and feel the smarter for having read.

Introducing xkcd

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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