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XKCD Author's New Unpublished Book Becomes Scientific Best-Seller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."
There's lots of high quality, popular stuff. xkcd isn't.
"... but I won't go into detail about what that is, mainly because if you start liking it I'll have to find something even more obscure to like so I can maintain my superiority!"
Nerd hipsterism is a sad thing to behold.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
... isn't it a little stupid to be giving awards to a book that isn't published yet? That's like giving an unfinished indie game the award of "game of the year"...
oh wait. That's actually happened before.
Buck Feta. You know what to do.
The point is not to be practical, or to actually explain how these things work. The point is to be funny.