And there’s that gimmick from “Up-Goer Five”: the book is written using only the top thousand (or “ten hundred”) words most commonly used in the English language.Īt some points, this produces passages of such startling clarity that one forgets there was ever anything difficult to understand about these phenomena. He has chosen a diverse range of things to explain: from helicopters to a human cell, from the table of elements to the machines in a hospital room. Munroe’s beautiful, ligne claire-style illustrations are perfect for this task: you can pick out the tiny individual chairs in a recreation room on an oil rig, or the parcels in the hold of a tall ship. Thing Explainer: Complicated Stuff in Simple Words is an illustrated “how things work” book.
If that happens, it means you won’t go to space today, or maybe ever.”Īnd now this concept has a book of its own. “Another thing that is a bad problem,” the diagram tells us, “is if you’re flying toward space and the parts start to fall off your space car in the wrong order. It’s both good science – it really does show how the rocket works – and funny, partly because of the limitations and bathos of the language. One of XKCD’s most popular strips was titled “Up-Goer Five” a diagram of the 1960s Saturn V rocket explained in simple terms. Of course, explaining jokes is a task fraught with danger, but here goes. Part of the point is that you learn a little. If that all seems a bit challenging, there is even an “ Explain XKCD” site, which walks you through the science, technology or general knowledge needed to “get” each of Munroe’s jokes. There are comic strips with mathematical symbols, strips containing programming code, strips where you really need to know what a “clockwise polar plot” is to understand the joke.
It’s delightful, good-humoured and never talks down to its readers the opposite, if anything. (The name, incidentally, is simply a set of letters that don’t appear in any English words in that order, so are easy to Google.) Drawn in a simple, elegant and clean style, it tells jokes for people who know something about science and maths. XKCD, the “webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math and language” written for the past 10 years by Randall Munroe, is a geek phenomenon.
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