Munroe, a NASA roboticist in his
past career, is the creator of the webcomic xkcd which has a blog portion
called What If. In the What
If blog Munroe answers strange questions with real science broken down into
layman’s terms and illustrated with stick figures. For this book he collected some of his
favorite, most popular, and some new questions and answers. If you have any interest in physics, math,
basically anything to do with science, and you have an odd sense of humor (like
me apparently), you should probably give this one a chance. I especially enjoyed his explanation of
human genetics using D&D character stats and the way he explained not only
the destructive end of the Richter scale, but it’s gentler side as well.
If you were that kid that always
asked why? and how? this is the book that will finally give you the answers to
the hard questions – like how many people would need to shoot laser pointers at
the moon to make it change color and what would happen if you swam in a
spent-nuclear-fuel pool? Trust me, you
want to know.
