Books by Munroe, Randall
- Munroe, Randall. How To. New York: Riverhead Books, 2019. ISBN 978-1-4736-8033-3.
- The author of the Web comic xkcd.com answers questions about how to accomplish a variety of tasks we've all faced: building a lava moat around out supervillain redoubt, digging a hole, jumping really high, or skiing almost forever. It's fun, and you may learn some actual science along the way.
- Munroe, Randall. Thing Explainer. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2015. ISBN 978-0-544-66825-6.
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What a great idea! The person who wrote this book explains not simple
things like red world sky cars, tiny water bags we are made of, and
the shared space house, with only the ten hundred words people use
most.
There are many pictures with words explaining each thing. The idea
came from the
Up Goer Five
picture he drew earlier.
Drawing by Randall Munroe / xkcd used under right to share but not to sell (CC BY-NC 2.5).
Many other things are explained here. You will learn about things in the house like food-heating radio boxes and boxes that clean food holders; living things like trees, bags of stuff inside you, and the tree of life; the Sun, Earth, sky, and other worlds; and even machines for burning cities and boats that go under the seas to throw them at other people. This is not just a great use of words, but something you can learn much from. There is art in explaining things in the most used ten hundred words, and this book is a fine work of that art. Read this book, then try explaining such things yourself. You can use this write checker to see how you did. Can you explain why time slows down when you go fast? Or why things jump around when you look at them very close-up? This book will make you want to try it. Enjoy! The same writer also created What If? (2015-11) Here, I have only written with the same ten hundred most used words as in the book.
(The words in the above picture are drawn. In the book they are set in sharp letters.) - Munroe, Randall. What If? New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2014. ISBN 978-0-544-27299-6.
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As a child, the author would constantly ask his parents odd
questions. They indulged and encouraged him, setting him on
a lifetime path of curiosity, using the mathematics and physics
he learned in the course of obtaining a degree in physics
and working in robotics at NASA to answer whatever popped into
his head. After creating the tremendously successful Web comic
xkcd.com, readers began to ask him
the kinds of questions he'd mused about himself. He began a
feature on xkcd.com: “What
If?” to explore answers to these questions. This book is
a collection of these questions, some previously published on-line
(where you can continue to read them at the previous link), and
some only published here. The answers to questions are interspersed
with “Weird (and Worrying) Questions from the What If? Inbox”,
some of which are reminiscent of my own
Titanium
Cranium mailbox. The book abounds with the author's
delightful illustrations. Here is a sample of the questions
dealt with. I've linked the first to the online article to give
you a taste of what's in store for you in the book.
- Is it possible to build a jetpack using downward firing machine guns?
- What would happen if you tried to hit a baseball pitched at 90% the speed of light?
- In the movie 300 they shoot arrows up into the sky and they seemingly blot out the sun. Is this possible, and how many arrows would it take?
- How high can a human throw something?
- If every person on Earth aimed a laser pointer at the Moon at the same time, would it change color?
- How much Force power can Yoda output?
- How fast can you hit a speed bump while driving and live?
