Saturday, December 26, 2015

What If?

First let me start by saying that Randall Munroe's what if blog is one of the treasures of the internet. If you have never heard of it, he does back of the napkin calculations for generally silly questions. Some of my favorites include
1) How many BBs would it take to stop a speeding train: http://what-if.xkcd.com/18/
2) How to build a jetpack out of downward firing machine guns: http://what-if.xkcd.com/21/
3) Changing the color of the moon with laser pointers (which contains the phrase
Unfortunately, the laser energy flow would turn the atmosphere to plasma, instantly igniting the Earth’s surface and killing us all.
But let’s assume that the lasers somehow pass through the atmosphere without interacting.
Under those circumstances, it turns out Earth still catches fire. 
): http://what-if.xkcd.com/13/


Anyway, this book is a collection of his posts and some original content.  It is interesting when things people are giving away for the free on the internet (webcomics, blogs, and the like) transition into money making in the physical world.  It is interesting to see what twists the author puts on their product to make it worth buying rather than reading for free on the internet.  In this case, it is some new questions and answers.  However, honestly they are (in my opinion, duh) some of the worse ones of the book.  They are still good, but definitely not in my favorites.

If you want to know the real answer to questions like "How many BBs can stop a train?", this isn't the book for you. The math is generally back of the napkin style and many of the concepts are oversimplified to the point of being unrecognizable by an expert.  However, if you want to think about interesting questions with reasonable simulacra of the answers, this is exactly the book for you. The author has a humorous tone and is clearly having fun researching and writing the answers.  As such, the book is best suited to someone who wants to have fun reading it (and honestly, it is hard not to),

While this is a great concept and a fun book, if you are even moderately internet savvy, you can get 90% of the enjoyment from this book simply by reading the blog.

Overall, I would give this a 90%.

No comments:

Post a Comment