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XKCD Author's New Unpublished Book Becomes Scientific Best-Seller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."
If you want to cultivate a positive image for science, you'll want to cultivate fans. They'll always outnumber the real scientists. The reason is rather simple: popularity -idealized- determines policy. So you want as many fans as possible for things concerning ecology (fossil fuels, global climatology), economy (less recessions, better investments, smarter spending savings debt management), immunology (Jenny McCartney is merely the tip of the festering social pus that is willful ignorance), technological advancements (take some time to compare what NASA is funded with per tax dollar vs. how much the solutions of space problems had saved in normal R&D when they release the data for free constantly without having pay patents). And so on.
I agree with Maddox about how annoying fans are versus real science; but only someone blind cannot see the advantage of having popular (and populist) opinion in your corner.