Thing Explainer: Complicated Stuff in Simple Words - Softcover

Munroe, Randall

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1473637317 ISBN 13: 9781473637313

Publisher: John Murray, 2017

Synopsis

From the No. 1 bestselling author of What If? - the man who created xkcd and explained the laws of science with cartoons - comes a series of brilliantly simple diagrams ('blueprints' if you want to be complicated about it) that show how important things work: from the nuclear bomb to the biro.

About this title

About the Author

Randall Munroe is the creator of the webcomic xkcd and bestselling author of What If?, Thing Explainer and xkcd: Volume 0. Randall was born in Easton, Pennsylvania, and grew up outside Richmond, Virginia. After studying physics at Christopher Newport University, he got a job building robots at NASA Langley Research Center. In 2006 he left NASA to draw comics on the internet full time, and has since been nominated for a Hugo Award three times. The International Astronomical Union recently named an asteroid after him: asteroid 4942 Munroe is big enough to cause mass extinction if it ever hits a planet like Earth.

From the Back Cover

From Randall Munroe, the No.1 bestselling author of What If? - the man who created xkcd and explained the laws of science with cartoons - comes a series of brilliantly - and simply - annotated blueprints that explain everything from the nuclear bomb to the biro.

From the Inside Flap

Have you ever tried to learn more about some amazing thing, only to be frustrated by incomprehensible jargon? Randall Munroe is here to help. In Thing Explainer he uses only the thousand (or the ten hundred) most common words to provide simple explanations for some of the most interesting stuff there is, including:

*food-heating radio boxes (microwaves)
*tall roads (bridges)
*shared space house (the international Space Station)
*the other worlds around the sun (the solar system)
*the big flat rocks we live on (tectonic plates)
*the pieces everything is made of (the periodic table)
*sky boats with turning wings (helicopters)
*boxes that make clothes smell better (washing machines and dryers)
*the bags of stuff inside you (human organs)

How do these things work? Where do they come from? What would life be like without them? And what would happen if we opened them, heated them up, cooled them down, pointed them in a different direction, or even, pressed this button?

In Thing Explainer, Munroe gives us the answers to these questions and so many more. Funny, interesting and always understandable, this book is for anyone - from 5 to 105 - who has ever wondered how things work and why.

Edition details

• Publisher: John Murray
• Publication date: 2017
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1473637317
• ISBN 13: 9781473637313
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 64