Thing Explainer gets to the real essence of things - New Scientist It is very funny and has something quite serious to say about our misplaced faith in long words - Telegraph In the crowded field of trivia, nothing beats Thing Explainerby Randall Munroe, the physicist-turned-comic-artist, a sequel to What If ?. He has written a wonderful guide for curious minds - BILL GATES If one of Munroe's drawings inspires you to go learn more about a subject - including a few extra terms - then he will have done his job. filled with cool basic knowledge about how the world works. If you know Munroe's previous work, it will come as no surprise that parts of Thing Explainer are laugh-out-loud funny. And Randall Munroe is the perfect guy to take on a project like this.

If you can't explain something simply, you don't really understand it. Praise for Thing Explainer: Complicated Stuff in Simple WordsĪ brilliant concept. Funny, interesting, and always understandable, this book is for anyone - age 5 to 105 - who has ever wondered how things work, and why. In THING EXPLAINER, Munroe gives us the answers to these questions and many, many more. Where do these things come from? How do they work? What do they look like if you open them up? And what would happen if we heated them up, cooled them down, pointed them in a different direction, or pressed this button? So are the other worlds around our sun (the solar system), the big flat rocks we live on (tectonic plates), and even the stuff inside us (cells). Many of the things we use every day - like our food-heating radio boxes ('microwaves'), our very tall roads ('bridges'), and our computer rooms ('datacentres') - are strange to us. In THING EXPLAINER, Randall Munroe takes a quantum leap past this: he explains things using only drawings and a vocabulary of just our 1,000 (or the ten hundred) most common words. Richard Feynman once said that if you can't explain something to a first-year student, you don't really get it. It's good to know what the parts of a thing are called, but it's much more interesting to know what they do. 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.

Randall munroe's thing explainer