Books: What If? (2014) and How To (2019)

Two books by the creator of XKCD comics, Randall Munroe.  He does, like, weird science cartoons with stick figures.


His books are subtitled "Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions" (in the first case) and "Absurd Scientific Advice for Common Real-World Problems."  That gives you some idea what they're about.

Here's a sampling of the questions in the first book:

• If my printer could literally print out money, would it have that big an effect on the world?
  
• What would happen if a hair dryer with continuous power were turned on and put in an airtight 1 x 1 x 1-meter box?
  
• How fast can you hit a speed bump while driving and live?
  

The answers are meticulously researched, very scientific, and completely hilarious.

Here's a sampling from the second book:

• How to make an emergency landing (head for farmland, or forests, or water, or what?)
  
• How to tell if you're a nineties kid
  
• How to be on time (by altering the flow of time)
  

Ditto the first book.  Nice lightweight reading that still makes you stop and marvel.  Two insights from the new book:

1. To make a piano that goes all the way down to the limits of human hearing (20 Hz.) you'd only need to add 5 keys to a grand piano*.  But the strings would need to be 24 feet long (with a standard string)
   
2. The reason property boundary markers are in the dirt, instead of just compass points on a map, are to allow for the sometimes-considerable shifting of soil
   

* - A Bösendorfer Concert Grand 290 Imperial piano has 97 keys, 9 more than normal, with a low C of 16.352 Hz.  The piano is 9'6" long.  They use a heavier-gauge string to get around the 24-foot length requirement.

NoCoPilot wrote:

The reason property boundary markers are in the dirt, instead of just compass points on a map, are to allow for the sometimes-considerable shifting of soil

Isn't that the wrong way round?

Nope.  Your property moves with the soil.  Except I suppose in extreme cases.

Consider the movement of the tectonic plates, which is about 3-5 cm per year.  Property boundaries including national borders must move with them.

Now, if there was a landslide and your view property ended up at the bottom of the hill or in the ocean, that would be a different story.

Randall Munroe wrote:

The 1964 Alaska earthquake shifted much o the city of Anchorage sideways by roughly 15 feet. To deal with the resulting land-ownership questions, the state passed a law in 1966 allowing all property lines to be resurveyed to match the new location of the ground. California passed a similar law, the Cullen Earthquake Act, in 1972, which let property owners ask courts to redraw lines in a way that protected the interests of all those involved.

If you live in Alaska or California, at least, it might seem like these rules would keep your neighbor from gradually taking ownership of parts of your house. But there's a catch: courts have ruled that these laws apply only to sudden movements, not gradual ones.

According to polling on which issues voters are most agreed upon, if you wanted to lose an election in the most spectacular fashion your stump speech would go something like this:

Quote :

A vote for me is a vote for high unemployment, war, workplace theft, and texting while driving. I believe every citizen's voice should be heard in every movie theater in the country. If elected, I vow to put an end to the Olympics once and for all.

My administration will raise taxes on small business and use the money to install a video game console in every lifeguard chair in the country. We will manufacture and sell crystal meth, and use the proceeds to give tax credits to anyone who practices medicine without a license. We will engage in money laundering, but only to support terrorism. Every decision in my administration will be made by the Magic 8-Ball. If our country is invaded, I will surrender immediately.

Vote for me if you love hunger. Vote for me if you hate your friends. And if you vote for me, I promise you this: every one of you will be twice as attractive and half as smart.

The human body can briefly withstand G-forces of greater than 1 G, but for sustained acceleration that's a comfortable maximum.

If you accelerated at 1 G for 30 seconds, then decelerated for 30 seconds, you'd travel more than 5 miles and your top speed would almost break the speed of sound.

A trip to the moon, in 1 G acceleration and deceleration, would take 4 hours. That's why future moon workers probably won't commute from earth.

I also ordered Munroe's other book, "Thing Explainer" from 2015.  It seems to have entirely disappeared from store shelves shortly after its release.  

It's a large format book, and it's a little different than the other two.  Each page is one large drawing, of complicated stuff like a hydrogen bomb, a washer/dryer, your body, a tree, a weather front, etc.  Munroe uses small words to humorously explain what each part does and how they function together to make a big complex system.

The book reminds me of Pete Frame's "Rock Family Trees" -- more of a reference book than something to be read at a sitting for entertainment.