Free download or read online What If? The first edition of the novel was published in September 2nd , and was written by Randall Munroe. The book was published in multiple languages including English, consists of pages and is available in Hardcover format.
Fans of xkcd ask Munroe a lot of strange questions. What if you tried to hit a baseball. Millions visit xkcd. Fans ask him a lot of strange questions: How fast can you. The founder of the international Transition Towns movement asks why true creative, positive thinking is in decline, asserts that it's more important now than ever, and suggests ways our communities can revive and reclaim it. In these times of deep division and deeper despair, if there is a consensus about. Creativity, the power of imagination, and the importance of self-expression are celebrated in this inspiring picture book written and illustrated by real-life best friends.
This girl is determined to express herself! If she can't draw her dreams, she'll sculpt or build, carve or collage. If she can't do that, she'll. A swimmer who does not dive down and touch a spent fuel rod would be exposed to less radiation than a person normally gets walking around.
The water temperature would be slightly less than that of a hot tub. Workers actually swim in these pools to service them…. If you want some lightweight edification, you won't go wrong with How To. How To is a guide to the third kind of approach. It's full of highly impractical advice for everything from landing a plane to digging a hole.
Bestselling author and cartoonist Randall Munroe explains how to predict the weather by analyzing the pixels of your Facebook photos.
He teaches you how to tell if you're a baby boomer or a 90's kid by measuring the radioactivity of your teeth. He offers tips for taking a selfie with a telescope, crossing a river by boiling it, and powering your house by destroying the fabric of space-time. And if you want to get rid of the book once you're done with it, he walks you through your options for proper disposal, including dissolving it in the ocean, converting it to a vapor, using tectonic plates to subduct it into the Earth's mantle, or launching it into the Sun.
By exploring the most complicated ways to do simple tasks, Munroe doesn't just make things difficult for himself and his readers.
As he did so brilliantly in What If? Full of clever infographics and fun illustrations, How To is a delightfully mind-bending way to better understand the science and technology underlying the things we do every day. Workers actually swim in these pools to service them He teaches you how to tell if you're a baby boomer or a millennial by measuring the radioactivity of your teeth.
He offers tips for taking a selfie with a telescope, crossing a river by boiling it, and getting to your appointments on time by destroying the moon. And if you want to get rid of this book once you're done with it, he walks you through your options for proper disposal, including dissolving it in the ocean, converting it to a vapour, using tectonic plates to subduct it into the Earth's mantle, or launching it into the sun.
Full of clever infographics and amusing illustrations, How To is a delightfully mind-bending way to better understand the science and technology underlying the things we do every day. Violence is common. Everybody is hungry and thirsty. Grocery stores are emptied. Within weeks, Rhode Island is a graveyard of billions. Our species staggers on, but our population has been greatly reduced.
But at least now we know. First, some definitions. A mole is a unit. A mole is also a type of burrowing mammal. One pound is 1 kilogram. I happen to remember that a trillion trillion kilograms is how much a planet weighs. Mammals are largely water. A kilogram of water takes up a liter of volume, so if the moles weigh 4. The cube root of 4. So doing this on Earth is definitely not an option.
Gravitational attraction would pull them into a sphere. But this is where it gets weird. The mole planet would be a giant sphere of meat. Normally, when organic matter decomposes, it releases much of that energy as heat. Closer to the surface, where the pressure would be lower, there would be another obstacle to decomposition— the interior of a mole planet would be low in oxygen.
While inefficient, this anaerobic decomposition can unlock quite a bit of heat. If continued unchecked, it would heat the planet to a boil. But the decomposition would be self-limiting.
Throughout the planet, the mole bodies would gradually break down into kerogen, a mush of organic matter that would—if the planet were hotter—eventually form oil. Because the moles form a literal fur coat, when frozen they would insulate the interior of the planet and slow the loss of heat to space. However, the flow of heat in the liquid interior would be dominated by convection. Eventually, after centuries or millennia of turmoil, the planet would calm and cool enough that it would begin to freeze all the way through.
The deep interior would be under such high pressure that as it cooled, the water would crystallize out into exotic forms of ice such as ice III and ice V, and eventually ice II and ice IX. There might be a billion habitable planets in our galaxy. If you want a mole of moles, build a spaceship. All watts have to go somewhere. This is true of any device that uses power, which is a handy thing to know. Are they right? This is true of almost any powered device.
At that temperature, the box will be losing heat to the outside as fast as the hair dryer is adding it inside, and the system will be in equilibrium. If the box is made of metal, it will be hot enough to burn your hand if you touch it for more than five seconds. The temperature it reaches will depend on the thickness of the box wall; the thicker and more insulating the wall, the higher the temperature.
I wonder how high this dial goes. Two megawatts pumped into a laser is enough to destroy missiles. One more notch. Now 18 megawatts are flowing into the box. If it were steel, it would have melted by now. The floor is made of lava. Before it can burn its way through the floor, someone throws a water balloon under it. The burst of steam launches the box out the front door and onto the sidewalk. According to Back to the Future, the hair dryer is now drawing enough power to travel back in time.
It sits in the middle of a growing pool of lava. Anything within 50— meters bursts into flame. A column of heat and smoke rise high into the air. Periodic explosions of gas beneath the box launch it into the air, and it starts fires and forms a new lava pool where it lands. We keep turning the dial. At In , H. Wells imagined devices like this in his book The World Set Free.
The story eerily foreshadowed the development, 30 years later, of nuclear weapons. The box is now soaring through the air. Each time it nears the ground, it superheats the surface, and the plume of expanding air hurls it back into the sky. The outpouring of 1. A trail of firestorms —massive conflagrations that sustain themselves by creating their own wind systems —winds its way across the landscape. The box, soaring high above the surface, is putting out energy equivalent to three Trinity tests every second.
At this point, the pattern is obvious. This thing is going to skip around the atmosphere until it destroys the planet. We turn the dial to zero as the box is passing over northern Canada. Rapidly cooling, it plummets to Earth, landing in Great Bear Lake with a plume of steam. And then. When the 1- kiloton nuke went off below, the facility effectively became a nuclear potato cannon, giving the cap a gigantic kick.
The cap was never found. When we turn it back on, our reactivated hair dryer box, bobbing in lake water, undergoes a similar process. The heated steam below it expands outward, and as the box rises into the air, the entire surface of the lake turns to steam.
It exits the atmosphere and continues away, slowly fading from second sun to dim star. Much of the Northwest Territories is burning, but the Earth has survived. If a charger is connected to something, like a smartphone or laptop, power can be flowing from the wall through the charger into the device.
However, neither of them answered this particular question. Without people, there would be less demand for power, but our thermostats would still be running. As coal and oil plants started shutting down in the first few hours, other plants would need to take up the slack.
This kind of situation is difficult to handle even with human guidance. However, plenty of electricity comes from sources not tied to the major power grids. These can continue to operate until they run out of fuel, which in most cases could be anywhere from days to months. Wind turbines People relying on wind power would be in better shape than most. Some windmills can run for a long time without human intervention.
Modern turbines are typically rated to run for 30, hours three years without servicing, and there are no doubt some that would run for decades. One of them would no doubt have at least a status LED in it somewhere. Hydroelectric dams Generators that convert falling water into electricity will keep working for quite a while.
The dam would probably succumb to either clogged intakes or the same kind of mechanical failure that would hit the wind turbines and geothermal plants. Even without anything using their power, batteries gradually self-discharge.
Some types last longer than others, but even batteries advertised as having long shelf lives typically hold their charge only for a decade or two. There are a few exceptions. Nobody knows exactly what kind of batteries it uses because nobody wants to take it apart to figure it out.
Nuclear reactors Nuclear reactors are a little tricky. As soon as something went wrong, the core would go into automatic shutdown. This would happen quickly; many things can trigger it, but the most likely culprit would be a loss of external power.
Space probes Out of all human artifacts, our spacecraft might be the longest-lasting. Within centuries, our Mars rovers will be buried by dust. GPS satellites, in distant orbits, will last longer, but in time, even the most stable orbits will be disrupted by the Moon and Sun. Many spacecraft are powered by solar panels, and others by radioactive decay. Eventually the voltage will drop too low to keep the rover operating, but other parts will probably wear out before that happens.
So Curiosity looks promising. With no human instructions, it will have no reason to turn them on. Solar power Emergency call boxes, often found along the side of the road in remote locations, are frequently solar-powered. They usually have lights on them, which provide illumination every night. If we follow a strict definition of lighting, solar- powered lights in remote locations could conceivably be the last surviving human light source. Watch dials used to be coated in radium, which made them glow.
Over the years, the paint has broken down. Although the watch dials are still radioactive, they no longer glow. Watch dials, however, are not our only radioactive light source. In the dark, these glass blocks glow blue. And thus, we arrive at our answer: Centuries from now, deep in concrete vaults, the light from our most toxic waste will still be shining.
In case something went wrong, next to the railing was stationed a distinguished physicist with an axe. The principle here is pretty simple. If you fire a bullet forward, the recoil pushes you back. So if you fire downward, the recoil should push you up. The Saturn V had a takeoff thrust-to-weight ratio of about 1.
As it turns out, the AK has a thrust-to-weight ratio of around 2. This means if you stood it on end and somehow taped down the trigger, it would rise into the air while firing. In practice, the actual thrust would turn out to be up to around 30 percent higher. The amount of extra force this adds varies by gun and cartridge. The overall efficiency also depends on whether you eject the shell casings out of the vehicle or carry them with you. I asked my Texan acquaintances if they could weigh some shell casings for my calculations.
We can try using multiple guns. If you fire two guns at the ground, it creates twice the thrust. If each gun can lift 5 pounds more than its own weight, two can lift An AK magazine holds 30 rounds. We can improve this with a larger magazine—but only up to a point. The reason for this is a fundamental and central problem in rocket science: Fuel makes you heavier. If we added more than about rounds, the AK would be too heavy to take off.
The largest versions of this craft could accelerate upward to vertical speeds approaching meters per second, climbing over half a kilometer into the air.
With enough machine guns, you could fly. Can we do better? My Texas friends suggested a series of machine guns, and I ran the numbers on each one. Some did pretty well; the MG, a heavier machine gun, had a marginally higher thrust-to-weight ratio than the AK Then we went bigger.
To put it another way: If I mounted a GAU-8 on my car, put the car in neutral, and started firing backward from a standstill, I would be breaking the interstate speed limit in less than three seconds.
Its thrust-to- weight ratio approaches 40, which means if you pointed one at the ground and fired, not only would it take off in a rapidly expanding spray of deadly metal fragments, but you would experience 40 gees of acceleration.
This is way too much. Landing lights almost always broke after firing. Or something else? Fortunately, your body handles air pressure changes like that all the time. Air pressure changes quickly with height. If your phone has a barometer in it, as a lot of modern phones do, you can download an app and actually see the pressure difference between your head and your feet. At about two hours and two kilometers, the temperature would drop below freezing. The wind would also, most likely, be picking up.
If you have any exposed skin, this is where frostbite would start to become a concern. However, unless you had a warm coat, the temperature would be a bigger problem. Over the next two hours, the air would drop to below- zero temperatures. But when? The scholarly authorities on freezing to death seem to be, unsurprisingly, Canadians.
According to their model, the main factor in the cause of death would be your clothes. Above meters—above the tops of all but the highest mountains—the oxygen content in the air is too low to support human life. Near this zone, you would experience a range of symptoms, possibly including confusion, dizziness, clumsiness, impaired vision, and nausea. Your veins are supposed to bring low-oxygen blood back to your lungs to be refilled with oxygen.
This would happen around the seven-hour mark; the chances are very slim that you would make it to eight.
She died as she lived—rising at a foot per second. I mean, as she lived for the last few hours. And two million years later, your frozen body, still moving along steadily at a foot per second, would pass through the heliopause into interstellar space.
Clyde Tombaugh, the astronomer who discovered Pluto, died in It can, of course, vary quite a bit. The hull would likely be airtight. There may be a few specialized one- way valves that would let air out, but in all likelihood, the submarine would remain sealed. The big problem the crew would face would be the obvious one: air. Everyone knows that space is very cold. The ocean is colder than space.
Interstellar space is very cold, but space near the Sun —and near Earth—is actually incredibly hot! When I was a kid, my dad had a machine shop in our basement, and I remember watching him use a metal grinder. Without a warm environment around you radiating heat back to you, you lose heat by radiation much faster than normal. Without rockets, it has no way to do this.
Okay—technically, a submarine does have rockets. Unfortunately, the rockets are pointing the wrong way to give the submarine a push.
Rockets are self-propelling, which means they have very little recoil. With a rocket, you just light it and let go. But not launching them could. It means the warmth of sunlight in winter. Since there are 7. Your extra two million bills a year would barely be enough to notice. Would the storm cell be immediately vaporized? It turns out the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration—the agency that runs the National Hurricane Center—gets it a lot, too.
Water turbines can be pretty efficient. For those 42 minutes, our hypothetical house could generate up to watts of electricity, which might be enough to power everything inside it. It works, but it feels so wrong. I bike to class sometimes. To increase the temperature of the air layer in front of your body by 20 degrees Celsius enough to go from freezing to room temperature , you would need to be biking at meters per second.
Since drag increases with the square of the speed, this limit would be pretty hard to push any further. How much physical space does the Internet take up? The storage industry produces in the neighborhood of million hard drives per year. If most of them are 3. So, by that measure, the Internet is smaller than an oil tanker. I am a guy who draws pictures on the Internet. With that out of the way. To answer the questions that follow, we need to get an idea of where lightning is likely to go.
They say lightning strikes the tallest thing around. I mean, not all lightning hits Mount Everest. But does it find the tallest person in a crowd? The tallest person I know is probably Ryan North. What about other reasons? So how does lightning pick its targets? The leader carries comparatively little current —on the order of amps.
This is the blinding flash you see. It races back up the channel at a significant fraction of the speed of light, covering the distance in under a millisecond. This is where the meter sphere comes in. To figure out where lightning is likely to hit, you roll the imaginary meter sphere across the landscape.
Places the surface makes contact —treetops, fence posts, and golfers in fields—are potential lightning targets. A relatively small helium balloon—certainly smaller than a parachute—will suffice to slow your fall, but it still has to be huge by party balloon standards. The biggest consumer rental helium tanks are about cubic feet, and you would need to empty at least ten of them to put enough air in the balloon to support your weight.
Compressed helium cylinders are smooth and often quite heavy, which means they have a high terminal velocity. As soon as you emptied one, you could drop it.
0コメント