After the success of What If?, xkcd creator Randall Munroe is back to explain some more things to you–without using any big words.
Thing Explainer, due out this November from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, is a book of detailed diagrams of things like cells, data centers, rockets, and more. But what sets it apart from your average “how things work” book is that everything is explained using the thousand most common English words. It’s a spin-off of his comic Up Goer Five, which includes details about the Saturn V like “lots of fire comes out here” and “sky-bag air” (hydrogen).
Here’s Munroe’s announcement on his blog, and below you can see a poster featuring the Mars Curiosity rover. Thing Explainer is available for pre-order now.
SO EXCITED! It takes a keen mind to explain complicated things in a simple way without losing too much in the translation. Randall does that well. I expect this to be a fantastic tool for teaching my kids! (Plate tectonics can be a bit confusing to a 5-year-old without diagrams.)