Don't Try This at Home

摘要

Question: What if you took a celebrated Internet cartoonist and set him loose on a bunch of wildly hypothetical science questions? Answer: You would get an incredibly fun book with quirky, hand-drawn pictures. The cartoonist in question is Randall Munroe, and his much-anticipated first book, What If?, debuts in early September. In it, he presents a collection of essays that address queries submitted by readers of his acclaimed Web comic xkcd. For the past two years Munroe has been writing and illustrating weekly blog posts along these lines. The book selects from these posts and expands on them, taking the opportunity to discuss a breadth of scientific, technical, and mathematical topics in whimsical, illuminating ways.