Thing Explainer

1 bestselling author of What If? - the man who created xkcd and explained the laws of science with cartoons - comes a series of brilliantly simple diagrams (''blueprints'' if you want to be complicated about it) that show how important things work: from the nuclear bomb to the biro. It''s good to know what the parts of a thing are called, but it''s much more interesting to know what they do. Richard Feynman once said that if you can''t explain something to a first-year student, you don''t really get it. In Thing Explainer, Randall Munroe takes a quantum leap past this: he explains things using only drawings and a vocabulary of just our 1,000 (or the ten hundred) most common words. Many of the things we use every day - like our food-heating radio boxes (''microwaves''), our very tall roads (''bridges''), and our computer rooms (''datacentres'') - are strange to us. So are the other worlds around our sun (the solar system), the big flat