You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
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 an enormous, dedicated following, as do his deeply researched answers to his fans' strangest questions. The queries he receives range from merely odd to downright diabolical: - What if I took a swim in a spent-nuclear-fuel pool? - Could you build a jetpack using downward-firing machine guns? - What if a Richter 15 earthquake hit New York City? - Are fire tornadoes possible? His responses are masterpieces of clarity and wit, gleefully and accurately explaining everything from the relativistic effects of a baseball pitched at near the speed of light to the many horrible ways you could die while building a periodic table out of all the actual elements. The book features new and never-before-answered questions, along with the most popular answers from the xkcd website. What If? is an informative feast for xkcd fans and anyone who loves to ponder the hypothetical.
Collection of strips from Xkcd, a free webcomic.
Randall Munroe is . . .'Nerd royalty' Ben Goldacre 'Totally brilliant' Tim Harford 'Laugh-out-loud funny' Bill Gates 'Wonderful' Neil Gaiman AN INSTANT #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER The world's most entertaining and useless self-help guide, from the brilliant mind behind the wildly popular webcomic xkcd and the million-selling What If? and Thing Explainer For any task you might want to do, there's a right way, a wrong way, and a way so monumentally bad 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. 'How strange science can fix everyday problems' New Scientist 'A brilliant book: clamber in for a wild ride' Nature
The creator of the popular webcomic "xkcd" uses line drawings and just ten hundred common words to provide simple explanations for how things work, including microwaves, bridges, tectonic plates, the solar system, the periodic table, helicopters, and other essential concepts.
MACHINE OF DEATH tells thirty-four different stories about people who know how they will die. Prepare to have your tears jerked, your spine tingled, your funny bone tickled, your mind blown, your pulse quickened, or your heart warmed. Or better yet, simply prepare to be surprised. Because even when people do have perfect knowledge of the future, there's no telling exactly how things will turn out.
Traditional Chinese edition of What If? 2:Additional Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions
• What time is it at the North Pole? • What's the chemical formula for a human being? • Why do boomerangs come back? • Why do flying fish fly? • Do the living really outnumber the dead? • Why does lightning fork? • Why does the end of a whip crack? Everyone has at one time or another thought up odd questions like these, questions that are strange, intriguing, maybe even impossible to answer. Making your morning omelet, perhaps you've wondered why most eggs are egg shaped. Or maybe, the last time you walked on the beach, you felt compelled to ask why the sea is salty. Watching Polly sit on her perch, have you ever marveled at how she stays there -- even when she's asleep? Well, ...
Year two of this fresh, timely, beautiful addition to the Best American series, introduced by Nate Silver The rise of infographics across virtually all print and electronic media reveals patterns in our lives and worlds in fresh and surprising ways. As we find ourselves in the era of big data, where information moves faster than ever, infographics provide us with quick, often influential bursts of art and knowledge — to digest, tweet, share, go viral. Best American Infographics 2014 captures the finest examples, from the past year, of this mesmerizing new way of seeing and understanding our world. Guest introducer Nate Silver brings his unparalleled expertise and lively analysis to this visually compelling new volume.
What is charisma? And how does it generate influence and power? World-renowned sociologist Randall Collins explores these and many other questions in a highly readable exploration of the various forms of charisma and how charisma elevated Jesus, Cleopatra, Lawrence of Arabia, Queen Elizabeth, Hitler, Churchill, Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, Madame Mao Zedong, and others. He explores four types of charisma: frontstage, backstage, success-magic, and reputational charisma. Not everyone has the same kind of charisma and Collin’s identifies important differences and their relations to power. The book exemplifies Collin’s sophisticated micro-sociology in accessible and compelling prose, quietly building subtle matrices of analysis that show how sociology unveils hidden discoveries.
From the author of Outlander, a magnificent epic that once again sweeps us back in time to the drama and passion of 18th-century Scotland. For twenty years Claire Randall has kept her secrets. But now she is returning with her grown daughter to Scotland's majestic mist-shrouded hills. Here Claire plans to reveal a truth as stunning as the events that gave it birth: about the mystery of an ancient circle of standing stones, about a love that transcends the boundaries of time and about James Fraser, a Scottish warrior whose gallantry once drew a young Claire from the security of her century to the dangers of his. Now a legacy of blood and desire will test her beautiful copper-haired daughter, Brianna, as Claire's spellbinding journey of self-discovery continues in the intrigue-ridden Paris court of Charles Stuart, in a race to thwart a doomed Highlands uprising and in a desperate fight to save both the child and the man she loves.