Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

The Munroe Doctrine

What If?: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions by Randall Munroe

How To: Absurd Scientific Advice for Common Real-World Problems by Randall Munroe

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When I was in grad school, most of my professors used xkcd comics at some point.  I’m pretty sure I understand p-values because of this strip. My friend told me about a book by “that stick figure comic guy from class” so I checked it out. That was What If? by Randall Munroe. What If? is a book that provides real scientific and mathematic answers to absolutely absurd, but fun questions.  Questions like: How many fireflies would it take to match the brightness of the […]

Random and Clever

How To by Randall Munroe

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Best for: People who like science and humor. In a nutshell: Author Munroe takes on everyday problems like ‘How to Move’ with increasingly absurd advice like ‘get a bunch of helicopters to do that’, and then explains the science behind it. Worth quoting: When discussing using trained birds of prey to knock drones out of the sky: “…but any plan that calls for countering rogue machines by training animals to hurl themselves at them is probably a bad one. We wouldn’t enforce speed limits by […]

Fun Read with Tiny Print

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Best for: People looking for fun, quick explanations of common machines (like helicopters or washer/dryers) and nature (like the night sky). In a nutshell: Creator of xkcd brings his cute drawings and research skills to a large-format book. Line that sticks with me: None really, but I did chuckle a bunch. Why I chose it: I thoroughly enjoyed his book “What If” — it was one of my top books last year. So it seemed natural to pick up his next one. Review: This is […]

If you’ve seen the comic, you know what this book is

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This book kept popping up in my Amazon Prime as a free download, but I never payed it any attention until KimMiE” reviewed it a month ago and mentioned that the author was the guy who makes the XKCD comics. That was all I needed to hear. Taken from the “What If?” Section of the website, where he answers the internet’s most inexplicable science-ish questions (for instance: what would happen if everyone actually had one soulmate, one random person in the world?). His answers are […]

Recommended for lovers of nifty charts

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I’m going to sound like my dad here (who, incidentally, would love this), but this book was just really neat. I got a copy from the library, and it’s big and full of charts and infographics and pages that fold out. Just super cool, you guys. So Munroe (who writes the xkcd comic and also wrote the excellent What If) used to work for NASA, and as he explains in the introduction to Thing Explainer, he often resorts to big words in order to sound smart while explaining things (which […]

So you’re saying the movie 300 might not have been historically accurate?

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I picked up this book not knowing too much about it, except that it looked quirky with some fun artwork and promised to teach me math and physics in an entertaining way. I didn’t know that the author, Randall Munroe, is the cartoonist behind xkcd.com, the delightful webcomic where stick figures rule and sarcasm explains science. Munroe actually studied physics in school and was a roboticist at NASA before becoming a cartoonist full-time. On his site, and in this book, he combines his passion for science with his keen […]



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