Thing Explainer
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"In Thing Explainer: Complicated Stuff in Simple Words, things are explained in the style of Up Goer Five, using only drawings and a vocabulary of the 1,000 (or "ten hundred") most common words. The book will explore computer buildings (datacenters), the flat rocks we live on (tectonic plates), the things you use to steer a plane (airliner cockpit controls), and the little bags of water you're made of (cells)."
Thing Explainer is Munroe's second published book, not including xkcd comic books, which he announced on May 13th, 2015 in the blag after the amazing success of what if?. The book is a collection of diagrams and line drawings similar in style to the Up Goer Five comic, which can also be purchased as a poster. It will be published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt on November 24th.
Summary
Have you ever tried to learn more about some incredible thing, only to be frustrated by incomprehensible jargon? Randall Munroe is here to help. In Thing Explainer, he uses line drawings and only the thousand (or, rather, “ten hundred”) most common words to provide simple explanations for some of the most interesting stuff there is, including:
- food-heating radio boxes (microwaves)
- tall roads (bridges)
- computer buildings (datacenters)
- the shared space house (the International Space Station)
- the other worlds around the sun (the solar system)
- the big flat rocks we live on (tectonic plates)
- the pieces everything is made of (the periodic table)
- planes with turning wings (helicopters)
- boxes that make clothes smell better (washers and dryers)
- the bags of stuff inside you (cells)
How do these things work? Where do they come from? What would life be like without them? And what would happen if we opened them up, heated them up, cooled them down, pointed them in a different direction, or pressed this button? In Thing Explainer, Munroe gives us the answers to these questions and so many more. Funny, interesting, and always understandable, this book is for anyone—age 5 to 105—who has ever wondered how things work, and why.
Book Cover
Cueball could be seen on the cover overlooking some of the labelled pictures. It is likely that the book will explore the themes labeled on the front cover which includes astronomy, constellations, and geology.
Preview Pages
Promotion at the top of the xkcd home page
At the time the comic 1612: Colds came out, the top part of xkcd had been changed to promote the book. The entire section was a link to the book on amazon.com:
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Ooooh, I know I get this one for x-mas, but there is soooo long until then... Nice to have something you really want for x-mas again. Only 20 more days to go. Can't wait.--Kynde (talk) 13:06, 4 December 2015 (UTC)
I put in the promotional picture. If someone could make it appear smaller I would appreciate this. I'm not sure how to do this without changing the file's resolution. Which I do not wish to do. It should be possible to see this version of the picture by opening the file. --Kynde (talk) 13:09, 4 December 2015 (UTC)
If the 1000 (ten hundred) word vocabulary is still too complex and you want to explain things in even simpler terms, you might take a look at the learnthesewordsfirst.com dictionary. It explains the 2000 most common English words using a set of only 360 words (the "semantic atoms and molecules" from the lessons). It is intended for 2nd-language learners, but interesting from the perspective of explaining things using reductive paraphrase. Lexyacc (talk) 23:31, 4 July 2016 (UTC)
I am pretty sure that in between the solar panels on the "shared space house" is the barrel boy from comic 1108.162.212.95
I wish for explanations for Thing Explainer, using more words. For instance, when explaining cells, I'm not sure what is the "bag filler" (the Golgi apparatus? but does it make bags of death water aka lysosomes), the strange boxes (???), the empty pockets (???), the doping substances they produce (???). It also took me a while to guess and google what ships visited the ISS. There, the "big carrier from many countries" seems the European ATV (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automated_Transfer_Vehicle), but that flew to the ISS 5 times, not 4. Since I'm clueless and Munroe isn't, I must be missing something. --Blaisorblade (talk) 20:39, 7 September 2019 (UTC)
- Hm, the empty boxes are probably vesicles and vacuoles, including secretory vesicles (https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Secretory_vesicles&redirect=no), used to make hormones including steroids. While I finally found this out, each time it takes googling and luck — googling the nontechnical terms fails; here I looked at https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Animal_Cell.svg. --Blaisorblade (talk) 20:48, 7 September 2019 (UTC)
