a b " 'What If' There Were An Entire Book Devoted To Absurd Hypotheticals?". National Public Radio. NPR staff. 2014-09-07. Archived from the original on 2016-04-06.

book - xkcd what if? 2: the book - xkcd

What If? is mainly composed of answers Munroe gives to readers' hypothetical questions on various scientific topics. The questions tend to be rather unusual, assuming an improbable scenario and inquiring a logical conclusion to the situation. The first question Munroe answered for the blog was the following: [9] But the guys at my table were all like, "Yeah... I can see myself reading like 2 or 3 of these and then putting the book down..." Everyone more or less nodded in agreement - even though they thought the book was cool. And although the words are calming and inspiring it is most definitely the beautiful and brightly colored illustrations that bring it altogether. Although there are a few illustrations that didn't really stand out to me like the toes, the worms and the zebras, all of the rest of them did and they were charming. I found a few that just had me laughing with the thought. This story presents many "what if" scenarios like cats flying and magnetic turtles. The pictures are beautiful and the story is soft, simple and sweet. This book is definitely for a very young audience, but it's a very fun book. I could see three to five year olds bonding with parents and reading buddies over this joyful little book. The only thing that's thought-provoking about this book is the fact that it's sold millions of copies and is considered good by the vast majority.

a b c Ballard, Ed (2014-03-20). "Seven Lessons From the XKCD 'What If' Comic Strip". The Wall Street Journal. Archived from the original on 2016-04-06. If everyone on the planet stayed away from each other for a couple of weeks, wouldn't the common cold be wiped out? Munroe, Randall (2014). What If?: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions. ISBN 978-0544272996. The creativity of some of these what ifs is absolutely wild. Worms with wheels?! I never wouldh ave imagined it. I am totally impressed. Except for my only negative of the book. Then I looked at the book a little bit more closely, flipped through a little bit and thought, "Huh... that sounds about right. That's probably what I'm going to do..."

What If? - Teaching Ideas What If? - Teaching Ideas

In 2008, an economist and a law professor proposed a radical new approach to politics: Telling people not to do bad stuff. All that is to say, I am most likely not this book's target audience, being a completely ridiculous ball of anxiety over things that nearly 100% will never, ever, ever happen. (I have been reading XKCD since college, though. It is a constant fixture in my life, and is not terrifying.) Since 2012, Munroe has been answering unusual questions sent in by readers of xkcd on his blog What If?. The concept was inspired by a weekend program organized by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in which volunteers can teach classes to groups of high school students on any chosen subject. Munroe signed up after hearing about it from a friend and decided to teach a class on energy. Though the lecture felt "dry" at first, once Munroe started bringing up examples from Star Wars and The Lord of the Rings, the students became more excited. The entire second half of the class was eventually spent solving mathematical and physics problems. Munroe wrote the first entries a few years before the start of the blog, based on questions he was asked that day. [7] [8] I guess the answer might be “what pharmaceutical products have you ingested during the last four hours?” or “May I speak to your parents?”

Teaching Ideas and Resources:

OK, OK... Part of that is untrue - I didn't dump my boyfriend for not knowing what XKCD is. He's put up with some crazy kinds of shit from me, I GUESS I can accept this from him. *sigh* I couldn't resist reading part of this out loud to him, though. But to my dismay, I don't think that he fully appreciated the genius of it, but well... some people are colorblind. Life is sometimes cruel like that. Through all of this, I carried my precious ARC around, waiting for the time when I'd be able to spare the brainpower to read it. I even took it on tour with me. (Honestly, this book has more frequent flier miles than any three of you put together.) Second, for best usage of footnote text EVAR. (Really, I couldn't imagine reading this in ebook format - the footnotes made me giggle so frequently that if they were a pain in the tushie to read on an ebook, so much greatness would be missed.) Munroe notes that the average person would be about a third of a pound lighter, then gives a list of several ways that one can lose that amount of weight easier [more safely too!] – such as peeing.

What If? 2 by Randall Munroe | Waterstones

But let's stop and consider for a moment. Is any of the above geek behavior novel or unpredictable? Hardly. Geeks are always doing this kind of thing, and society has learned to work around them. Important as they may be in the long run, there's always some dependable non-geek person ready to step in just in case the geek in question has stayed up all night playing Halo or watching a Star Wars marathon. The non-geek will cover for them until the geek has got over their fifteen hour internet speed-chess session and is ready to do whatever it is they're actually being paid to do. star for my favorite question in the book, the one about calling random people on the telephone and saying "God Bless You," hoping to get someone who's just sneezedTrying to thoroughly answer a stupid question can take you to some pretty interesting places.Randall Munroe, ex-NASA employee and author of the wildly popular webcomic XKCD, decides to look at several, undoubtedly, absurd questions and find scientific answers to them. There are even a few proposed experiments that DO NOT result in the destruction of our planet. My favorite involves the speed of the International Space Station AND the 1988 song by the Proclaimers, "I'm Gonna Be (500 Miles)." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iqq4B...

Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical What If? Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical

The edge of the crowd spreads outward into southern Massachusetts and Connecticut. Any two people who meet are unlikely to have a language in common, and almost nobody knows the area. The state becomes a chaotic patchwork of coalescing and collapsing social hierarchies. Violence is common. I took the book into work with me to show it around - you know - hipster-esque and what not. I'm reading this trendy, new book first.Q. What temperature would a chainsaw (or other cutting implement) need to be at to instantly cauterize any injuries inflicted with it? – Sylvia Gallaher(These are probably the worst in the book.) One of these that I wished he had answered was this one.