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  • Randall Munroe: What If? : Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions
    Af Randall Munroe (2014)
    Summary: A special 10th anniversary edition of WHAT IF?, the classic million-copy best-seller from the creator of the wildly popular webcomic xkcd, featuring new material that asks What If? x 10. This "brilliant" (Rolling Stone) book offers hilarious and informative answers to absurd questions you probably never thought to ask. Fans of xkcd ask Munroe a lot of strange questions. What if you tried to hit a baseball pitched at 90 percent the speed of light? How fast can you hit a speed bump while driving and live? If there was a robot apocalypse, how long would humanity last? What if everyone only had one soulmate? What would happen if the moon went away? In pursuit of answers, Munroe ran computer simulations, pored over stacks of declassified military research memos, solved differential equations, and consulted with nuclear reactor operators. His responses are masterpieces of clarity and hilarity, complemented by signature xkcd comics. (They often predict the complete annihilation of humankind, or at least a really big explosion.) In celebration of 10 years, Randall Munroe has revised his classic blockbuster to ask What If? x 10. What happens when you up the stakes by a factor of ten? The result is a 10X adventure of scientific insight and inquiry. Featuring brand new 2 color annotations and illustrations, this special anniversary edition is far more than a book for geeks, What If? explains the laws of science in operation in a way that every intelligent reader will enjoy and feel much smarter for having read

  • Randall Munroe: What If? 2 : Additional Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions
    Af Randall Munroe (2022)
    Summary: AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER! An NPR Best Book of 2022 "The questions throughout What If? 2 are equal parts brilliant, gross, and wonderfully absurd and the answers are thorough, deeply researched, and great fun. . . . Science isn’t easy, but in Munroe’s capable hands, it surely can be fun." — TIME The #1 New York Times bestselling author of What If? and How To answers more of the weirdest questions you never thought to ask   The millions of people around the world who read and loved What If? still have questions, and those questions are getting stranger. Thank goodness xkcd creator Randall Munroe is here to help. Planning to ride a fire pole from the Moon back to Earth? The hardest part is sticking the landing. Hoping to cool the atmosphere by opening everyone’s freezer door at the same time? Maybe it’s time for a brief introduction to thermodynamics. Want to know what would happen if you rode a helicopter blade, built a billion-story building, made a lava lamp out of lava, or jumped on a geyser as it erupted? Okay, if you insist. Before you go on a cosmic road trip, feed the residents of New York City to a T. rex, or fill every church with bananas, be sure to consult this practical guide for impractical ideas. Unfazed by absurdity, Munroe consults the latest research on everything from swing-set physics to airliner catapult–design to answer his readers’ questions, clearly and concisely, with illuminating and occasionally terrifying illustrations. As he consistently demonstrates, you can learn a lot from examining how the world might work in very specific extreme circumstances