FREE THING EXPLAINER: COMPLICATED STUFF IN SIMPLE WORDS PDF Randall Munroe | 64 pages | 24 Nov 2015 | Hodder & Stoughton General Division | 9781473620919 | English | London, United Kingdom Thing Explainer - Wikipedia Goodreads helps you keep track of books you want to read. Want to Read saving…. Want to Read Currently Reading Read. Other editions. Enlarge cover. Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Open Preview See a Problem? Details if other :. Thanks for telling us about the problem. Return to Book Page. Preview — Thing Explainer by Randall Munroe. In Thing Explainer: Complicated Stuff in Simple Wordsthings are explained in the style of Up Goer Five, using only drawings and a vocabulary of the 1, or "ten hundred" most common words. Explore computer buildings datacentersthe flat rocks we live on tectonic platesthe things you use to steer a plane airliner cockpit controlsand the little bags of water In Thing Explainer: Complicated Stuff in Simple Wordsthings are explained in the style of Up Goer Five, using only drawings and a vocabulary of the 1, or "ten hundred" most common words. Explore computer buildings datacentersthe flat rocks we live on tectonic platesthe things you use to steer a plane airliner cockpit controlsand the little bags of water you're made of cells. Get A Copy. Hardcover64 pages. Published November 24th by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. More Details Original Title. Other Editions Friend Reviews. To see what your friends thought of this book, please sign up. To ask other readers questions about Thing Explainerplease sign up. Would this book be of any value in English as a Second Language instruction? Can things be clearly explained with only the thousand most common words or is it merely the ability to find a torturous way to do so that is interesting? Thing Explainer: Complicated Stuff in Simple Words I use it to teach paraphrasing. This has 24 reviews and isn't published yet. What's the deal? Tariqul Ponir Probably there were some review copies. Some of the stuffs might be on his blog. And then there are fans. I would love a review copy though. See all 3 questions about Thing Explainer…. Lists with This Book. Community Reviews. Showing Average rating 4. Rating details. More filters. Sort order. Aug 20, carol. Shelves: non-fictionabandoned-with- prejudicesciencefriend-recommendedyuckcomics-and-graphic-novel. We all have one, that person we'd prefer to get along with, but every time they open their mouth, so much stupid erupts that low-level irritation shifts into rage there's a certain political figure that I react to every time. That about sums up my experience with Thing Explainer. Every time I picked it up intending to read a few 'cartoons' explaining concepts like helicopters, the cell, elevators or the auto engine, I'd end up either generally annoyed or quite specifically angry. Thing Explainer We all have one, that person we'd prefer to get along with, but every time they open their mouth, so much stupid erupts that low-level irritation shifts into rage there's a certain political figure that I react to every time. Thing Explainer fails on so many levels for me, it was shocking. Schulz Characters and instead found cartoon explanations of things I still don't understand, such as how all the parts of a car work together. I understand that it Thing Explainer: Complicated Stuff in Simple Words supposed to be funny, but I was hoping for informative as well. It wasn't. Language is meant to communicate ideas. Generally, more complex ideas require more specific words to convey meaning. Remember when you last talked to a two or three year-old and everything with four legs was 'dog,' everything that flew was Thing Explainer: Complicated Stuff in Simple Words 'bird' and every time someone cried they must be 'sad? The more we grow in experiences and want to convey information with accuracy, the more we need that vocabulary. But specificity does not have to be incomprehensible. For instance, in explaining what leukemia was to someone who was just diagnosed with it, I first had to teach about red blood cells, white blood cells and platelets. I taught these common terms, so that we all understood what it Thing Explainer: Complicated Stuff in Simple Words mean when the nurse says, "your red blood cells are low and you need a transfusion. But the terms 'cells,' 'transfusion,' 'infection,' 'red,' and 'white' are non-negotiable Thing Explainer: Complicated Stuff in Simple Words learning the concepts related to blood. You have to understand them to understand communication about body processes. I tested Thing Explainer on something I know: Cells. Our body's cells are reduced to "Bags of Water. How is this even helpful? How does this help anyone understand the cell? It doesn't. I tested it on something I didn't know: the automobile engine. As he used the same words to explain its as to describe it, it's a useless explanation, like describing a circle as a 'round shape. The periodic table of elements was mildly amusing with descriptions like "green burning air that kills," "air in bright signs made from colored light," "the rock that makes up beaches, glass and computer brains," and at the end, "stuff that lasts for the time it takes you to close and open your eyes. So, Thing Explainer: Complicated Stuff in Simple Words so much for almost everyone. It took me a lot of reflection to pinpoint the source of my rage: while Munroe disingenuously suggests that he Thing Explainer: Complicated Stuff in Simple Words explaining 'complicated concepts in simple words,' he does so in such a way that the reader needs to understand the concept well to interpret his illustrations. This approach simultaneously insults the person who doesn't understand using the illusion of 'common words,' while creating an in-joke for people knowledgeable about those concepts. The other reason it made me angry is my impression that like many people, Munroe is confusing 'complex' with 'incomprehensible' or 'pretentious. Instead of actually communicating, what he did is replacement code sophisticated concepts into simple words, so to understand his comic, one mentally replaces "fire box" with 'engine. Except it is supposed to be funny when the reader knows the replacement code. I'm not laughing. View all comments. Feb 10, Manny rated it it Thing Explainer: Complicated Stuff in Simple Words amazing Shelves: translation-is-impossiblewell-i- think-its-funnysciencelists-glorious-listswhy-not-call-it-poetry. I loved the German translation so much that I had to buy the English edition Thing Explainer: Complicated Stuff in Simple Words The book has such an excellent idea that I only really thought about that when I read it in German, but in the original you can see what a poet Munroe is, and poetry never really translates quite right. If you do, it lets go of whatever it's holding on to. P I loved the German translation so much that I had to buy the English edition too People put these machines on boxes, doors, and cars, to try and control who can open or close them. What's interesting about these machines isn't really the machine itself. There are lots of different kinds that work in different ways, but they're all the same in one way. They try to put people into groups. By checking whether someone has a piece of metal that's the right shape, this machine is really a way to try to tell whether people are who they say they are. It's an idea - about which people should be allowed to do something - brought to life in metal. When the light metal or air is pushed together, it also starts another run-away fire here. These run-away fires help make each other stronger. By adding more and more steps like this, we found we could make the fires as big as we wanted, and at first we built the machines larger and larger. But then we stopped making the machines larger, and started making them smaller instead. We didn't stop because we didn't want to burn larger cities. We just realized you could burn a city more easily with a few small machines than with one big one. Soon, we had enough small machines to burn as many cities as we wanted. We stopped making the machines larger because Thing Explainer: Complicated Stuff in Simple Words ones we had were big enough to burn everything. There was nothing larger to burn. The air hits with so much power that the pieces break in strange new ways, as if it shakes the air - and space itself - so hard that things fall out. Most of these pieces only last for a moment, while space is being shaken really hard, and disappear as quickly as they appear. But by watching Thing Explainer: Complicated Stuff in Simple Words flies out from the place where the air was hit, we can figure out what we shook out. Confused much? You need the Thing Explainer: Complicated Stuff in Simple Words From the No. 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, 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.