It was published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt on November 24th and is available from among others Amazon to which a link has been posted on xkcd for a long time. The book is a collection of diagrams and line drawings similar in style to the Up Goer Five comic, which can also be purchased as a poster. Thing Explainer is Randall's second published book, not including xkcd comic books, which he announced on May 13th, 2015 in the blag following the amazing success of his what if? book based on the what if? blog. See a summary below and also the entire index from the book listing all the 45 different explanations. The book explores, among other things, computer buildings (datacenters), the flat rocks we live on (tectonic plates), the things you use to steer a plane (airliner cockpit controls), and the little bags of water you're made of (cells). Randall found his own method to determine which words would go on his list, a list that is revealed in the book. How long does each drag move take? Here is a histogram of the distribution of times as I went from the center to the left side.Thing Explainer: Complicated Stuff in Simple Words is a book by Randall Munroe where things are explained in the style of Up Goer Five (which is also included in the book), using only blueprint like drawings and a vocabulary of the 1,000 (or ten hundred) most common words in the English language. Oh, and think how long it took Randall to make this world. That’s a long time, but that’s the price to be an explorer. If I scrolled the window continuously (with no bathroom breaks), how long would this take? Using the same idea as above, it would be (7.2 x 10 5 m)/(6.88 m/s) = 1.05 x 10 5 seconds or 29 hours. It would just be a short distance to get there (compared to the total trip of 720 km). Of course, this also assumes that I would start in one corner of the world. This would put the total linear length at 201*3856 m = 720 km. If I assume a square world, then I would need to make (3586 m)/(17.8 m) = 201 rows. The travel time would be:īut what if you want to explore the whole world? If I just cut the xkcd-world into horizontal strips, how tall would each strip be? Going back to the first stick person, it looks like the height of the frame is about 10 xu (or 17.8 m) high. If I assume a world length of 3586 meters. And now I can estimate the time to go from the far right side of the map to the far left. Maybe you would like this in a value you can relate to the speed of your car? It would be 15.4 mph. The slope of this function is 3.87 xu/s which would be 6.88 m/s. Here is that same data along with a linear function. All I need to do is to fit a linear function to this data. I guess each person would be different, but as a first estimate we can use my data. But the first thing is to obtain an estimate for the scrolling speed. If you wanted to go over the whole map, how long would this take? Assume you use a standard back-and-forth pattern with no overlap at all. This would give a world-area of 4 square miles or 1.04 x 10 7 m 2. Let’s just pretend that the world is also 2 miles high. However, if I assume that the center of the map is just the center of the map and in fact they walked twice that distance – the stick person would be normal human height. That would be a pretty big stick person, over 10 feet tall. But where did they start walking? If they started at the center, that would put the value of 1 xu at: Near the edge of that map, one of the stick people says that they have walked 2 miles (3219 meters). If 1 xu is 1.78 meters then this would be 1793 meters. But the first thing this shows is the distance to the left side of the map. Perhaps I am an expert click-and-drag person and didn’t even know it. I am surprised at how smooth this plot looks. Here is a plot of the cumulative displacement as a function of time. But what about the distance? Essentially, I will just track the motion of the ground as the mouse drags along. I can later assume the size of this person to be about 1.78 meters (just an average human estimate). Here, I will call the unit of xu the xkcd-distance unit.
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