{"id":554,"date":"2017-07-26T16:00:16","date_gmt":"2017-07-26T22:00:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/benjamin-m-weilert.com\/?p=554"},"modified":"2017-09-10T15:58:46","modified_gmt":"2017-09-10T21:58:46","slug":"book-thing-explainer-2015","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/benjamin-m-weilert.com\/index.php\/2017\/07\/26\/book-thing-explainer-2015\/","title":{"rendered":"BOOK: Thing Explainer (2015)"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"ThingThing Explainer
\n<\/u><\/strong>Year: 2015
\nAuthor: Randall Munroe
\nLength: 64 pages<\/p>\n

Growing up in the 1990\u2019s, one of the defining books that helped me understand the world around me was David Macaulay\u2019s\u00a0The Way Things Work<\/em>. Using \u201ccartoonish\u201d drawings of plenty of everyday (and not so everyday) machines, I gained plenty of useful knowledge that probably led me to eventually earn my Master\u2019s Degree in Mechanical Engineering in 2009. While Macaulay\u2019s illustrations were straight forward enough that they didn\u2019t need explanations, some concepts around today certainly need some words to help gain an understanding of the way things work.<\/p>\n

Enter Randall Munroe, famed \u201cxkcd<\/a>\u201d webcomic author and an all around smart guy. In late 2012, he published a comic that described each of the systems in NASA\u2019s Saturn V rocket with simple words. Described as \u201cU.S. Space Team\u2019s Up Goer Five<\/a>,\u201d the concept of using shorter, more common words to explain complicated concepts came to its full fruition in\u00a0Thing Explainer<\/em>. Using the thousand most common words, Munroe manages to humorously and thoroughly explain such \u201cthings\u201d as the U.S. Constitution, The International Space Station, and the Large Hadron Collider (amongst many other common and complicated ideas).<\/p>\n

While the concept is fun and this book could easily be used to help children understand these fascinating ideas, the thousand-word constraint is also its biggest weakness. Sure, I could deduce that \u201cshafts\u201d were usually \u201csticks\u201d (or \u201challways\u201d if they were like mine shafts), and \u201cfire water\u201d often meant gasoline (or some other combustible fuel). However, I often found myself trying to figure out what the\u00a0actual<\/em>\u00a0name of the item or part in question was because the \u201csimple\u201d name wasn\u2019t self-explanatory. Also, it was sometimes a challenge to read all the small text, as it usually wasn\u2019t arranged in a linear format, instead appearing in chunks around the illustrations to be close to the parts that were being described.<\/p>\n

A unique concept to bring advanced technological knowledge to everyone, I give\u00a0Thing Explainer<\/em>\u00a04.0 stars out of 5.<\/p>\n

\"255px-Five-pointed_star_svg\"\u00a0<\/strong>\"255px-Five-pointed_star_svg\"\u00a0<\/strong>\"255px-Five-pointed_star_svg\"\u00a0<\/strong>\"255px-Five-pointed_star_svg\"<\/strong><\/h1>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Thing Explainer Year: 2015 Author: Randall Munroe Length: 64 pages Growing up in the 1990\u2019s, one of the defining books that helped me understand the world around me was David Macaulay\u2019s\u00a0The Way Things Work. Using \u201ccartoonish\u201d drawings of plenty of everyday (and not so everyday) machines, I gained plenty of useful knowledge that probably led […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,54],"tags":[33,55,712,709,8,711,710,714,713],"class_list":["post-554","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-4-0-stars","category-book","tag-33","tag-book","tag-david-macaulay","tag-randall-munroe","tag-review","tag-the-way-things-work","tag-thing-explainer","tag-what-if","tag-xkcd"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/benjamin-m-weilert.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/554","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/benjamin-m-weilert.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/benjamin-m-weilert.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/benjamin-m-weilert.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/benjamin-m-weilert.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=554"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/benjamin-m-weilert.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/554\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":677,"href":"https:\/\/benjamin-m-weilert.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/554\/revisions\/677"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/benjamin-m-weilert.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=554"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/benjamin-m-weilert.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=554"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/benjamin-m-weilert.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=554"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}