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XKCD Author's New Unpublished Book Becomes Scientific Best-Seller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."
"Technology for Pakleds" (they are smart)
"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.
in a book format.
http://xkcd.org/
"Freedom in the USA is not the ability to do what you want. It is the ability to stop others from doing what THEY want"
That would be "ten hundred" as it is written in the xkcd banner graphic.
100, not 1000
Ten hundred, not the hundred.
I made that mistake too, at first. I guess "thousand" isn't in the list (though I'm not sure which specific list he's using).
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
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!
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)
I'm a pretty good scientist, and I enjoy xkcd.
As a physicist, I don't expect the #1 book in "Physics" to be written by a professional physicist (although Randall has a physics degree and has worked a "physics" job). By definition, professional physicists don't specialize in mass market entertainment. Randall does specialize in entertainment, and I appreciate that he's using that expertise to write about science. If you don't like his approach, that's ok; there are other folks out there producing content about science differently.
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.
What award? It's a best-seller for Amazon, which simply means that a lot of people bought it. Why get so many preorders before release? Because of the way the New York Times calculates their lists.
To sell many copies of a book, it really helps to be on the New York Times best-seller list for a particular week. But to get on the list, you have to sell many copies in a week. The trick is that the Times counts sales when the books are DELIVERED, not when they are ordered. So what you do is pre-sell books for a long time prior to publication. The week the book is released, and orders are fulfilled, the Times counts allb of those preorders as sales for that one week that the book is actually released. Hopefully, that's enough to get on the Times best-seller list and all of the publicity associated with that.
This is also why you'll see very attractive offers for preorders, things like "preorder my new book and you'll get the DVD, plus my last book, for free". They aren't trying to make money on preorders, they're trying to get enough preorders to get on the best- seller list for the week when they fulfill the preorders.
Donald Trump is going to win because money is everything in US politics: the only way to get ahead is toupee.
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.
XKCD is also much funnier if you read the text-over captions. And I've repeatedly found myself referring to specific XKCD cartoons in technical meetings, to explain the problem with someone's clever sounding approach. Examples from the last few months include:
Sudo make me a sandwich.
Universal connector box.
Standards.
ISO 8601.
Real programmers.
Workflow.
Not everything is as good as those, but I've enjoyed them a great deal with children of my acquaintance.
Your penance is to use Windows 10 for 90 days - no dual booting and yes, that includes a phone. One more time and it is Bob.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
You can't fight reality. Randal has, in the past, said some pretty absurd stuff in his comics
Einstein said some pretty absurd stuff in real life - much of which is still widely quoted. Like that "God doesn't play dice" thing.
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.