Thing explainer: Complicated Stuff in Simple Words - Rilegato

Munroe, Randall

Rilegato

ISBN 10: 0544668251 ISBN 13: 9780544668256

Casa editrice: Time Warner, 2015

Riassunto

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.

Su questo libro

Recensione:

“...a wonderful guide for curious minds.” —Bill Gates   “Like any good work of science writing, [Thing Explainer] is equal parts lucid, funny, and startling.’’ —NewYorker.com PRAISE FOR WHAT IF?   "Toreinvigorate your sense of cosmic wonder...breeze through former NASA scientist Munroe's lively answers—peppered with line drawings—to some pretty bizarre questions about life, the universe, and everything else...Extreme astrophysics and indecipherable chemistry have rarely been this clearly explained or this consistently hilarious." —Entertainment Weekly "10 Best Nonfiction Books of the Year"   "Catchy and approachable...There's plenty of scientific rigor behind his elaborate explanations but he punctuates them with sly humor and winningly primitive cartoon diagrams...A cut above so many popular science and technology books." —NPR.org   "Consistently fascinating and entertaining...Munroe leavens the hard science with whimsical touches...An illuminating handbook of methods of reasoning." —Wall Street Journal   "Education should aim to teach people to reason confidently about problems that they have never come across before. This book is a great deal of fun, and a masterclass in such reasoning. Like all the best lessons, you only realise you’ve learned something once you’ve finished it." —The Economist   "Munroe takes inane, useless and often quite pointless questions asked by real humans (mostly sent to him through his website), and turns them into beautiful expositions on the impossible that illuminate the furthest reaches, almost to the limits, of the modern sciences...The answers are all illustrated with XKCD’s trademark stick figures...and these are eminently approachable." —Newsweek   "What If? Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions includes old favorites, new inquiries and the mix of expert research and accessible wit that has made Munroe a favorite among both geeks and laymen."  —TIME   "Loaded with the same dry wit and blank-faced stick figures that populate xkcd, What If? is that rare book that will have you laughing as you learn just how a mass extinction might unfold." —Discover  

“...a wonderful guide for curious minds.” —Bill Gates   “Like any good work of science writing, [Thing Explainer] is equal parts lucid, funny, and startling.’’ —NewYorker.com PRAISE FOR WHAT IF?   "Toreinvigorate your sense of cosmic wonder...breeze through former NASA scientist Munroe's lively answers—peppered with line drawings—to some pretty bizarre questions about life, the universe, and everything else...Extreme astrophysics and indecipherable chemistry have rarely been this clearly explained or this consistently hilarious." —Entertainment Weekly "10 Best Nonfiction Books of the Year"   "Catchy and approachable...There's plenty of scientific rigor behind his elaborate explanations but he punctuates them with sly humor and winningly primitive cartoon diagrams...A cut above so many popular science and technology books." —NPR.org   "Consistently fascinating and entertaining...Munroe leavens the hard science with whimsical touches...An illuminating handbook of methods of reasoning." —Wall Street Journal   "Education should aim to teach people to reason confidently about problems that they have never come across before. This book is a great deal of fun, and a masterclass in such reasoning. Like all the best lessons, you only realise you’ve learned something once you’ve finished it." —The Economist   "Munroe takes inane, useless and often quite pointless questions asked by real humans (mostly sent to him through his website), and turns them into beautiful expositions on the impossible that illuminate the furthest reaches, almost to the limits, of the modern sciences...The answers are all illustrated with XKCD’s trademark stick figures...and these are eminently approachable." —Newsweek   "What If? Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions includes old favorites, new inquiries and the mix of expert research and accessible wit that has made Munroe a favorite among both geeks and laymen."  —TIME   "Loaded with the same dry wit and blank-faced stick figures that populate xkcd, What If? is that rare book that will have you laughing as you learn just how a mass extinction might unfold." —Discover

Selected Praise for WHAT IF? A Best Book of 2014 from Amazon, TIME, Entertainment Weekly, Newsweek, People Magazine, Slate, AV Club, Huffington Post, and Kansas City Star  Featured on the Holiday Gift Guides for Barnes & Noble, San Francisco Chronicle, Los Angles Times, Boston Globe, Slate, Mashable, Geek Dad, BoingBoing, Paste Magazine, Gizmodo, Wired, BBC, and more!    "What If? maintains a delightfully free-wheeling tone throughout, especially  when complicated calculations lead to whimsical results...Despite all the hard facts and gigantic numbers, it never feels like a textbook—and you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to enjoy it. A" —Entertainment Weekly "Catchy and approachable...There's plenty of scientific rigor behind his elaborate explanations but he punctuates them with sly humor and winningly primitive cartoon diagrams...A cut above so many popular science and technology books." --NPR.org "Consistently fascinating and entertaining...Munroe leavens the hard science with whimsical touches...An illuminating handbook of methods of reasoning." --Wall Street Journal "It’s fun to watch as Munroe tackles each question and examines every possible complication with nerdy and methodical aplomb, his distinctive scribblings providing clever running commentary of peanut-gallery jokes as his train of thought (sometimes) happily derails. The delightfully demented ‘What If?’ is the most fun you can have with math and science, short of becoming your own evil genius...We feel the tug of Munroe’s playful yet existentially-tinged worldview, and all that geek logic and number-crunching becomes unexpectedly poignant." --Boston Globe “Munroe has hit on a wonderful form of science and engineering communication that can do so much—extolling the value of analytical thinking, examining data, and doing back-of-the-envelope calculations—while entertaining readers at the same time... an incredibly fun book with quirky, hand-drawn pictures.” —American Scientist "[What If?] has solved my annual birthday-present and holiday-gift dilemmas for a large group of people...What makes Munroe's work so fantastic is a combination of two elements: his commitment to trying to answer even the weirdest question with solid science, and his undeniable sense of humor." —Huffington Post "Munroe takes inane, useless and often quite pointless questions asked by real humans (mostly sent to him through his website), and turns them into beautiful expositions on the impossible that illuminate the furthest reaches, almost to the limits, of the modern sciences..The answers are all illustrated with XKCD’s trademark stick figures...and these are eminently approachable." —Newsweek "What If? Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions includes old favorites, new inquiries and the mix of expert research and accessible wit that has made Munroe a favorite among both geeks and laymen."—TIME

L'autore:

Randall Munroe is the author of the New York Times bestseller What If?, the science question-and-answer blog What If?, and the popular webcomic xkcd. In 2006, he left a job building robots at NASA to draw comics on the Internet full-time. He lives in Massachusetts.

Su questa edizione

• Editore: Time Warner
• Data di pubblicazione: 2015
• ISBN 10: 0544668251
• ISBN 13: 9780544668256
• Rilegatura: Copertina rigida
• Numero di pagine: 61