Sadly, my current Thing Explainer book tour doesn’t stop in the UK (although you can come see me at London’s Royal Institution via live videolink on December 7th—tickets here). However, in lieu of an in-person visit, my publisher and I have put together a special puzzle for UK readers to solve. The puzzle has two steps. Step one is to find out where step two is. …
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A Thing Explainer word checker
Want to try writing using only simple words? Here’s a writing checker you can use: xkcd.com/simplewriter. To help me write the words in my Up Goer Five picture, I taught my computer to watch my writing and tell me when one of the words I used wasn’t in the top ten hundred. After I put up my Up Goer picture, other people made things to check writing, too …
I’m going on a book trip!
I made a book that explains things. It’s called Thing Explainer. It will be out soon! It’s a big flat book full of pictures of things with lots of parts. There are also little words that tell you what all the parts do. You can read more about it here! When my book comes out in two months, I’m going to visit a …
New book: Thing Explainer
A while ago, I posted the comic Up Goer Five, an annotated blueprint of the Saturn V rocket with all the parts described using only the thousand most common English words. Today, I’m excited to announce that I’m publishing a collection of large-format (9″x13″) Up Goer Five-style blueprints. The book is full of detailed diagrams of interesting objects, along with explanations of what …
What If book tour!
My book, What If?: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions, comes out September 2nd (Pre-order: Amazon, Barnes & Noble, IndieBound), and I’m excited to announce that I’ll be going on a book tour! Here’s the event list: Tuesday, September 2 CAMBRIDGE, MA Harvard Book Store at Brattle Theatre 40 Brattle St. 6:00pm (Seating is …
ISEE-3
Back in early March, I posted comic #1337, Hack, about a wayward spacecraft. ISEE-3/ICE was returning to fly past Earth after many decades of wandering through space. It was still operational, and could potentially be sent on a new mission, but NASA no longer had the equipment to talk to it—and announced that reconstructing the equipment …
What if I wrote a book?
For the last couple years, I’ve been answering your science questions on What If. Today, I’m excited to announce that the What If? book is coming! What If?: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions will be published September 2nd by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Starting today you can pre-order it from your favorite bookseller (Barnes & Noble, Amazon, Indie Bound). There are …
The Baby Name Wizard
The OKCupid statistics blog, by Christian Rudder, is amazing. Sadly, it hasn’t updated since 2011, around when OKCupid was bought by Match.com. (Rudder says the timing was a coincidence—he took time off for another project, and the blog may return soon!) In the meantime, I’d like to recommend another unexpectedly engrossing blog: The Baby Name Wizard blog, …
Asteroid 4942 Munroe
Whoa. There’s an asteroid named after me! Amazing xkcd readers Lewis Hulbert and Jordan Zhu noticed that the International Astronomical Union—the organization in charge of official astronomical naming—was taking suggestions for what to name small Solar System objects. They submitted my name for asteroid (4942) 1987 DU6, and it was subsequently renamed 4942 Munroe. I’m really touched. I spent all …
1190: Time
On Friday, xkcd #1190—Time—came to an end. It was a huge project, but since it was all concealed within a single comic panel, I thought I’d end with this short post to explain what was going on. If you want to see the story yourself before I spoil anything, you can use one of the many …
xkcd 