From the creator of the wildly popular webcomic xkcd, hilarious and informative answers to important questions you probably never thought to ask.

Millions of people visit xkcd.com each week to read Randall Munroe's iconic webcomic. His stick-figure drawings about science, technology, language, and love have a large and passionate following.

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?

In pursuit of answers, Munroe runs computer simulations, pores over stacks of declassified military research memos, solves differential equations, and consults 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.

The book features new and never-before-answered questions, along with updated and expanded versions of the most popular answers from the xkcd website. What If? will be required reading for xkcd fans and anyone who loves to ponder the hypothetical.

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.

AN INSTANT #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

How To will make you laugh as you learn...With How To, you can't help but appreciate the glorious complexity of our universe and the amazing breadth of humanity's effort to comprehend it. If you want some lightweight edification, you won't go wrong with How To. --CNET

[How To] has science and jokes in it, so 10/10 can recommend. --Simone Giertz

The world's most entertaining and useless self-help guide from the brilliant mind behind the wildly popular webcomic xkcd, the bestsellers What If? and Thing Explainer, and What If? 2, coming September 13, 2022

For any task you might want to do, there's a right way, a wrong way, and a way so monumentally complex, excessive, and inadvisable that no one would ever try it. How To is a guide to the third kind of approach. It's full of highly impractical advice for everything from landing a plane to digging a hole.

Bestselling author and cartoonist Randall Munroe explains how to predict the weather by analyzing the pixels of your Facebook photos. He teaches you how to tell if you're a baby boomer or a 90's kid by measuring the radioactivity of your teeth. He offers tips for taking a selfie with a telescope, crossing a river by boiling it, and powering your house by destroying the fabric of space-time. And if you want to get rid of the book once you're done with it, he walks you through your options for proper disposal, including dissolving it in the ocean, converting it to a vapor, using tectonic plates to subduct it into the Earth's mantle, or launching it into the Sun.

By exploring the most complicated ways to do simple tasks, Munroe doesn't just make things difficult for himself and his readers. As he did so brilliantly in What If?, Munroe invites us to explore the most absurd reaches of the possible. Full of clever infographics and fun illustrations, How To is a delightfully mind-bending way to better understand the science and technology underlying the things we do every day.

Have you ever tried to learn more about some incredible thing, only to be frustrated by incomprehensible jargon? Randall Munroe is here to help. In Thing Explainer, he uses line drawings and only the thousand (or, rather, ten hundred) most common words to provide simple explanations for some of the most interesting stuff there is, including:

• food-heating radio boxes (microwaves)
• tall roads (bridges)
• computer buildings (datacenters)
• the shared space house (the International Space Station)
• the other worlds around the sun (the solar system)
• the big flat rocks we live on (tectonic plates)
• the pieces everything is made of (the periodic table)
• planes with turning wings (helicopters)
• boxes that make clothes smell better (washers and dryers)
• the bags of stuff inside you (cells)

How do these things work? Where do they come from? What would life be like without them? And what would happen if we opened them up, 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 so 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.

Randall Munroe describes xkcd as a webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language. While it's practically required reading in the geek community, xkcd fans are as varied as the comic's subject matter. This book creates laughs from science jokes on one page to relationship humor on another.

xkcd: volume 0 is the first book from the immensely popular webcomic with a passionate readership (just Google xkcd meetup).

The artist selected personal and fan favorites from his first 600 comics. It was lovingly assembled from high-resolution original scans of the comics (the mouseover text is discreetly included), and features a lot of doodles, notes, and puzzles in the margins.

The book is published by Breadpig, which donates all of the publisher profits from this book to Room to Read for promoting literacy in the developing world.

Del ingeniero de la NASA, creador de la web humorística xkcd y autor del best seller Qué pasaría sí?, nos llega una serie de dibujos con descripciones brillantes -y simples- que lo explican todo, desde los reactores nucleares hasta los bolígrafos.

Has intentado alguna vez aprender algo sobre una cosa maravillosa, solo para frustrarte después ante una jerga incomprensible?

Randall Munroe está aquí para ayudarte.

Utilizando únicamente dibujos esquemáticos y las mil palabras (o, mejor dicho, los diez cientos) más comunes en nuestro idioma para dar explicaciones sencillas sobre algunas de las cosas más interesantes que existen, incluyendo:

- Calentador de comida con ondas (= microondas)
- Carreteras en alto (= puentes)
- Edificio con ordenadores (= centro de procesamiento de datos)
- Casa compartida en el espacio (= Estación Espacial Internacional)
- Mundos alrededor del sol (= sistema solar)
- Placas de roca sobre las que vivimos (= placas tectónicas)
- Elementos de los que está hecho todo (= tabla periódica)
- Barco volador con alar giratorias (= helicóptero)
- Máquinas para que la ropa huela mejor (= lavadora y secadora)
- Aparatos que tienes dentro (= órganos)

Cómo funcionan estas cosas? De dónde vienen? Cómo sería la vida sin ellas? Y qué ocurriría si las abrimos, las calentamos, las enfriamos, las orientamos en una dirección diferente o apretamos un determinado botón?

En El explicador de cosas, Munroe da respuesta a estas preguntas y a muchas más. Divertido, interesante y siempre comprensible, este libro es para cualquiera -entre 5 y 105 años- que alguna vez se haya preguntado cómo funcionan las cosas y por qué.

ENGLISH DESCRIPTION

In Thing Explainer: Complicated Stuff in Simple Words, things are explained in the style of Up Goer Five, using only drawings and a vocabulary of the 1,000 (or ten hundred) most common words. Explore computer buildings (datacenters), the flat rocks we live on (tectonic plates), the things you use to steer a plane (airliner cockpit controls), and the little bags of water you're made of (cells).