From the No. 1 bestselling author of What If? - the man who created
xkcd and explained the laws of science with cartoons - comes a
series of brilliantly simple diagrams ('blueprints' if you want to
be complicated about it) that show how important things work: from
the nuclear bomb to the biro. It's good to know what the parts of a
thing are called, but it's much more interesting to know what they
do. Richard Feynman once said that if you can't explain something
to a first-year student, you don't really get it. In Thing
Explainer, Randall Munroe takes a quantum leap past this: he
explains things using only drawings and a vocabulary of just our
1,000 (or the ten hundred) most common words. Many of the things we
use every day - like our food-heating radio boxes ('microwaves'),
our very tall roads ('bridges'), and our computer rooms
('datacentres') - are strange to us. So are the other worlds around
our sun (the solar system), the big flat rocks we live on (tectonic
plates), and even the stuff inside us (cells). Where do these
things come from? How do they work? What do they look like if you
open them up? And what would happen if we heated them up, cooled
them down, pointed them in a different direction, or pressed this
button? In Thing Explainer, Munroe gives us the answers to these
questions and many, many more. Funny, interesting, and always
understandable, this book is for anyone -- age 5 to 105 -- who has
ever wondered how things work, and why.
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Review This Product
Thing Explainer doesn't cut it
Tue, 29 Jan 2019 | Review
by: Chris G.
Giving this book as much as a single star is overdoing it. I found it pretentious, patronising and annoying. It uses 'cute' (the author calls them 'simple') words to describe ordinary things: eg, a crane is called a 'lifter', a shark is called a 'biting fish', a lens is a 'picture bender', a dishwasher is 'a box that cleans food holders'; the illustrations are complicated, over-detailed and word-crowded. Though perhaps aimed at children (this is NOT stated), it is irritating and will confuse children when they encounter the real terms instead of the juvenile ones used in this book. I think it is a colossal waste of time and money.
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