Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

cbr12bingo – How To!

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

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Randall Munroe, the engineer/author/cartoonist extraordinaire (most importantly- the creator of the excellent webcomic xkcd) is at it again with How To. He takes all sorts of simple questions and expands, explodes, and/or completely blows up the possible answers into a cacophony of hard science and absolute absurdity. Say you want to throw something really far- he starts out with an anecdote about George Washington hucking (technical term) a silver dollar across a river, which turns into a breakdown of how far silver dollars could be […]

Sometimes it’s best to get out while you still can

Mr. Darcy's Debt by April Floyd

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Another foray into the world of Pride and Prejudice variations.  I’m not sure how I feel about this one.  In the prologue, Mr. Thomas Bennet is a young man who is friends with the Fitzwilliam family siblings, including Bertram, Reginald, Anne (who will be Darcy’s mother) and Catherine (who will be Lady Catherine).  The party goes ice skating, and Thomas ends up saving Bertram and Anne’s lives, but Bertram ultimately succumbs to the illness that follows. Grateful that his sister is safe, Bertram vows that […]

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 […]

Only read this if you think it won’t scare the poop out of you.

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This book was equal parts hilarious and utter nightmare fuel. I have never had such an emotionally confusing reading experience. One second, snorting my drink up my nose from laughter, the next trying to shove down the sudden and complete terror I’m experiencing because I’ve been forced to imagine trying to survive in six atmospheres of pressure brought upon by an expanding Earth, or collapsing into a pile of human goo because I’ve lost my DNA, and doing so has reminded me of my mortality […]

If you suddenly began rising steadily at one foot per second, how exactly would you die?

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Embarking on a 13 hour car trip I asked a friend for a suggestion for an audiobook.  The words “xkcd” and “Wil Wheaton” were barely out of his mouth when I started to download it from my local libraries collection. And I was not disappointed. xkcd is “A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language” so clearly probably a hit with this audience.  There is a “What If” section where readers can ask questions and, as the title suggests, Randall Munroe will possibly choose one to […]

Detailed answers to questions you’ve never thought to ask.

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I’ll admit, I zipped through What if? by Randall Munroe pretty quickly. It’s an interesting idea for a book and some of the questions Munroe answers were strangely fascinating. Unfortunately, I don’t have much patience for lengthy sciency-wiency explanations, so sometimes I would sort of drift off, or skim the answers. I definitely felt smarter when I got to the end though and I’m just waiting to show off next time someone asks me an absurd hypothetical question. Munroe is an entertaining writer and I […]



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