The creator of the popular webcomic "xkcd" uses line drawings and just ten hundred common words to provide simple explanations for how things work, including microwaves, bridges, tectonic plates, the solar system, the periodic table, helicopters, and other essential concepts.
From the creator of the wildly popular webcomic xkcd, hilarious and informative answers to important questions you probably never thought to ask Millions of people visit xkcd.com each week to read Randall Munroe's iconic webcomic. His stick-figure drawings about science, technology, language, and love have an enormous, dedicated following, as do his deeply researched answers to his fans' strangest questions. The queries he receives range from merely odd to downright diabolical: - What if I took a swim in a spent-nuclear-fuel pool? - Could you build a jetpack using downward-firing machine guns? - What if a Richter 15 earthquake hit New York City? - Are fire tornadoes possible? His responses are masterpieces of clarity and wit, gleefully and accurately explaining everything from the relativistic effects of a baseball pitched at near the speed of light to the many horrible ways you could die while building a periodic table out of all the actual elements. The book features new and never-before-answered questions, along with the most popular answers from the xkcd website. What If? is an informative feast for xkcd fans and anyone who loves to ponder the hypothetical.
AN INSTANT #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER “How To will make you laugh as you learn…With How To, you can't help but appreciate the glorious complexity of our universe and the amazing breadth of humanity's effort to comprehend it. If you want some lightweight edification, you won't go wrong with How To.” —CNET “[How To] has science and jokes in it, so 10/10 can recommend.” —Simone Giertz The world's most entertaining and useless self-help guide from the brilliant mind behind the wildly popular webcomic xkcd, the bestsellers What If? and Thing Explainer, and What If? 2, coming September 13, 2022 For any task you might want to do, there's a right way, a wrong way, and a way so monumentally complex, excessive, and inadvisable that no one would ever try it. How To is a guide to the third kind of approach. It's full of highly impractical advice for everything from landing a plane to digging a hole. Bestselling author and cartoonist Randall Munroe explains how to predict the weather by analyzing the pixels of your Facebook photos. He teaches you how to tell if you're a baby boomer or a 90's kid by measuring the radioactivity of your teeth. He offers tips for taking a selfie with a telescope, crossing a river by boiling it, and powering your house by destroying the fabric of space-time. And if you want to get rid of the book once you're done with it, he walks you through your options for proper disposal, including dissolving it in the ocean, converting it to a vapor, using tectonic plates to subduct it into the Earth's mantle, or launching it into the Sun. By exploring the most complicated ways to do simple tasks, Munroe doesn't just make things difficult for himself and his readers. As he did so brilliantly in What If?, Munroe invites us to explore the most absurd reaches of the possible. Full of clever infographics and fun illustrations, How To is a delightfully mind-bending way to better understand the science and technology underlying the things we do every day.
Just when 12-year-old Summer thinks nothing else can possibly go wrong in a year of bad luck, an emergency takes her parents to Japan, leaving Summer to care for her little brother while helping her grandmother cook and do laundry for harvest workers. Illustrations.
Ordinary appliances and gadgets around the house get a new look, with a view to understanding their origin, purpose, and function. Readers learn how to think up ideas for new and special tools and appliances.
From podcast host Sutanya Dacres comes Dinner for One, an unforgettable memoir of how she rebuilt her life after her American-in-Paris fairy tale shattered, starting with cooking dinner for herself in her Montmartre kitchen When Sutanya Dacres married her French boyfriend and moved to Paris at twenty-seven, she felt like she was living out her very own Nora Ephron romantic comedy. Jamaican-born and Bronx-raised, she had never dreamed she herself could be one of those American women in Paris she admired from afar via their blogs, until she met the man of her dreams one night in Manhattan. A couple of years later, she married her Frenchman and moved to Paris, embarking on her own “happily-ever-after.” But when her marriage abruptly ended, the fairy tale came crashing down around her. Reeling from her sudden divorce and the cracked facade of that picture-perfect expat life, Sutanya grew determined to mend her broken heart and learn to love herself again. She began by cooking dinner for one in her Montmartre kitchen. Along the way, she builds Parisienne friendships, learns how to date in French, and examines what it means to be a Black American woman in Paris—all while adopting the French principle of pleasure, especially when it comes to good food, and exploring what the concept of self-care really means. Brimming with charm, humor, and hard-won wisdom, Sutanya's story takes you on an adventure through love, loss, and finding where you truly belong, even when it doesn’t look quite how you expected.
In How to Explain Absolutely Anything to Absolutely Anyone: The art and science of teacher explanation, Andy Tharby talks teachers through a set of remarkably simple techniques that will help revolutionise the precision and clarity of their message.Explanation is an art form, albeit a slightly mysterious one. We know a great explanation when we see or hear one, yet nevertheless we struggle to pin down the intricacies of the craft Just how exactly is it done?In How to Explain Absolutely Anything to Absolutely Anyone, Andy Tharby eloquently explores the art and science of this undervalued skill and illustrates how improving the quality of explanation can improve the quality of learning. Delving into the wonder of metaphor, the brilliance of repetition and the timeless benefits of storytelling, Andy sets out an evidence-informed approach that will enable teachers to explain tricky concepts so well that their students will not only understand them perfectly, but remember them forever too.By bringing together evidence and ideas from a wide range of sourcs including cognitive science, educational research and the study of linguistics the book examines how the most effective writers and speakers manage to transform even the most messy, complicated idea into a thing of wondrous, crystalline clarity. Then, by provoking greater thought and contemplation around language choices in the classroom, Andy spells out how the practical tools and techniques discussed can be put into practice.Andy also puts the important role of learner autonomy in context, recognising that there is a time for teachers to talk and a time for pupils to lead their own learning and contends that, in most cases, teachers should first lay out the premise before opening the space for interrogation. Ultimately, How to Explain Absolutely Anything to Absolutely Anyone argues that good teaching is not about talking more or less, but about talking better.Brimming with sensible advice applicable to a range of settings and subjects, this book is suitable for teachers and educators of learners aged 7 to 16
Have you ever wondered. * How an ATM verifies your identification and account information and dispenses cash in a matter of seconds? * What, if anything, is able to escape from a black hole? * Why workplace surveillance is becoming more common? * Whether human cloning is possible? In this full-color follow-up to the bestselling How Stuff Works, Marshall Brain travels inside your computer, to the depths of diamond mines, across the African plains, and on board an Apache helicopter to explain the magic behind how stuff works. Based on the much-lauded Web site HowStuffWorks.com, this book is your A-to-Z guide to PDAs, MRIs, LEDs, and dozens of other intriguing topics! With More How Stuff Works, you'll never again look the same way at a car wash, clothes dryer, or electronic scanner. * More than 125 captivating articles * Hundreds of full-color photos and illustrations * Fun facts and sidebars * A special chapter on "Police, Military, and Defense" Praise for HowStuffWorks.com: "A+" -Washington Post Online " Top 100 Classics." -PC Magazine "Best Science & Technology Resource." -Yahoo! InternetLife "A-" -Entertainment Weekly "Great Site." -MSNBC "Super Site." -TBS Superstation
How many species are there across the globe? How much do all of the insects in the world collectively weigh? How far can animals travel? Steve Jenkins answers these questions and many more with numbers, images, innovation, and authoritative science in his latest work of illustrated nonfiction. Jenkins layers his signature cut-paper illustrations alongside computer graphics and a text that is teeming with fresh, unexpected, and accurate zoological information ready for readers to easily devour. The level of scientific research paired with Jenkins’ creativity and accessible infographics is unmatched and sure to wow fans old and new.