Thing explainer: complicated stuff in simple words

Table of Contents

Introduction --
1. Shared space house : International Space Station --
2. Tiny bags of water you're made of : animal cell --
3. Heavy metal power building : nuclear reactor --
4. Red world space car : Curiosity Rover --
5. Bags of stuff inside you : human torso --
6. Boxes that make clothes smell better : washing machine and dryer --
7. Earth's surface : physical map of the earth --
8. Under a car's front cover : car engine --
9. Sky boat with turning wings : helicopter --
10. The US's laws of the land : US Constitution --
11. The US's Laws of the Land : USS Constitution --
12. Food-heating radio box : microwave --
13. Shape checker : padlock --
14. Lifting room : elevator --
15. Boat that goes under the sea : submarine --
16. Box that cleans food holders : dishwasher --
17. Big flat rocks we live on : tectonic plates --
18. Cloud maps : weather maps --
19. Tree : tree --
20. Machine for burning cities : nuclear bomb --
21. Water room : toilet and sink --
22. Computer building : data center --
23. US Space Team's Up Goer Five : Saturn V rocket --
24. Sky boat pusher : jet engine --
25. Stuff you touch to fly a sky boat : cockpit --
26. Big tiny thing hitter : large Hadron Collider --
27. Power boxes : batteries --
28. Hole-making city boat : oil rig --
29. Stuff in the earth we can burn : mines --
30. Tall roads : bridges --
31. Bending computer : laptop --
32. Worlds around the sun : solar system --
33. Picture taker : camera --
34. Writing sticks : pen and pencil --
35. Hand computer : smart phone --
36. Colors of light : electromagnetic spectrum --
37. The sky at night : night sky --
38. The pieces everything is made of : periodic table --
39. Our star : sun --
40. How to count things : units of measurement --
41. Room for helping people : hospital bed --
42. Playing fields : athletic fields --
43. Earth's past : geologic periods of earth --
44. Tree of life : life's family tree --
45. The ten hundred words people use the most : the ten hundred most common words in our language --
46. Sky toucher : skyscraper.

XKCD, the “webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math and language” written for the past 10 years by Randall Munroe, is a geek phenomenon. (The name, incidentally, is simply a set of letters that don’t appear in any English words in that order, so are easy to Google.) Drawn in a simple, elegant and clean style, it tells jokes for people who know something about science and maths. It’s delightful, good-humoured and never talks down to its readers; the opposite, if anything. There are comic strips with mathematical symbols, strips containing programming code, strips where you really need to know what a “clockwise polar plot” is to understand the joke. If that all seems a bit challenging, there is even an “Explain XKCD” site, which walks you through the science, technology or general knowledge needed to “get” each of Munroe’s jokes. Part of the point is that you learn a little.

Of course, explaining jokes is a task fraught with danger, but here goes. One of XKCD’s most popular strips was titled “Up-Goer Five”; a diagram of the 1960s Saturn V rocket explained in simple terms. It’s both good science – it really does show how the rocket works – and funny, partly because of the limitations and bathos of the language. “Another thing that is a bad problem,” the diagram tells us, “is if you’re flying toward space and the parts start to fall off your space car in the wrong order. If that happens, it means you won’t go to space today, or maybe ever.”


https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/dec/17/thing-explainer-complicated-stuff-simple-words-randall-munroe