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XKCD Author's New Unpublished Book Becomes Scientific Best-Seller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."
...is that ranking is about popularity, not quality.
There are way more science-fans than scientists, and the worst of these tend to enjoy xkcd.
Oh, fall off the planet
Typical childish anger at dissent that I've come to expect from xkcd fanatics.
I despise your implication that "popular" == "low quality".
Typical lack of logic I've come to expect from xkcd fanatics.
The only thing you can conclude is that popular does not imply high quality. Like I said.
There's lots of high quality, popular stuff. xkcd isn't.
No thanks. We've seen already what happens when scientists try to play the popularity game to advance Science. You get climate scientists who falsify results, and scientists who end up debating crackpots on TV all year long hoping to gain a little bit more recognition from people who'd rather watch the Kardashians and anyway have no intention to stop believing in invisible sky giants.
Scientists aren't trained to be TV personalities, and shouldn't waste time doing non-science things. The value proposition of Science is that it's the only way to get important things like cars, trains, airplanes, atomic bombs, electricity, computers, water sanitation, medicine, etc. The true supporters of Science are industry and the military, these are the people who need to be wooed, not your neighbours in the trailer park. And industry and the military tend to be wooed in the long term by things that actually work, and that's what Science is actually good at.
So cut the brandname crap, go back to the office and write a paper about something real.