Slashdot Mirror
XKCD Author's New Unpublished Book Becomes Scientific Best-Seller
An anonymous reader writes: XKCD cartoonist Randall Munroe will be publishing a new book in November, but it's already become Amazon's #1 best-seller in two "Science & Math" subcategories, for mechanics and scientific instruments. Inspired by a cartoon describing NASA's Saturn V rocket as "the up-goer V", Randall's created a large-format collection of blueprints describing datacenters, tectonic plates, and even the controls in an airplane cockpit — using only the thousand most common English words. "Since this book explains things, I've called it Thing Explainer," Randall writes on the XKCD blog, trying to mimic the humorously simple style of his book. Randall's previous book of scientific hypotheticals — published one year ago — is still Amazon's #1 best-selling book in their "Physics" category, ranking higher than Stephen Hawking's "A Brief History of Time."
"Most common 1000 words" is great for making a point.
Far more practical would be using a vocabulary that almost all 10-year-old native speakers can read and that a vast majority of non-native speakers who have spent the last few years living in a English-speaking environment (that is, an environment that pretty much forces you to learn to speak and read English at a basic level in order to survive).
I would expect this to be far more than 1000 words.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
That would be "ten hundred" as it is written in the xkcd banner graphic.
There's lots of high quality, popular stuff. xkcd isn't.
That's your opinion and you're welcome to it - just remember that that's all it is. Something who enjoys something you don't like is not automatically worse than you for it.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
A book written in only a thousand words, I thought, would be cool for people learning English. But it's not. The whole thing is shot through with Millennial cultural references, so much as to make it incomprehensible. Hell, I can barely understand parts of the sample page. People who had different life experiences from the author as well as non-native English speakers will be totally lost. Sad, I had such high hopes.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
I don't understand how the link supports what you say in your post. Whats absurd about saying that the new widespread availability of technology which can conclusively demonstrate tall tales, paired with the lack of such demonstrations, strongly implies that the tall tales were bullshit all along? That's the same reason we decided that Planet X doesn't exist, among countless other examples.
Ok, taking you seriously for a moment here: You've been double-bluffed.
Randall knows that the methodology is flawed. He's posting it as a self-referential deconstruction of the methodology that led to false beliefs, intentionally using junk science to discredit non-science secure in the knowledge that his science savvy readers will understand this and admire the inherent contradiction in what he's posting.
None of which detracts from the sheer common bloody sense insight that he's included for the benefit of those that missed the nuance above.
Somehow you fell through the cracks. Perhaps you should read a different web comic.