From the creator of the wildly popular webcomic xkcd, hilarious and informative answers to important questions you probably never thought to ask Millions of people visit xkcd.com each week to read Randall Munroe's iconic webcomic. His stick-figure drawings about science, technology, language, and love have an enormous, dedicated following, as do his deeply researched answers to his fans' strangest questions. The queries he receives range from merely odd to downright diabolical: - What if I took a swim in a spent-nuclear-fuel pool? - Could you build a jetpack using downward-firing machine guns? - What if a Richter 15 earthquake hit New York City? - Are fire tornadoes possible? His responses are masterpieces of clarity and wit, gleefully and accurately explaining everything from the relativistic effects of a baseball pitched at near the speed of light to the many horrible ways you could die while building a periodic table out of all the actual elements. The book features new and never-before-answered questions, along with the most popular answers from the xkcd website. What If? is an informative feast for xkcd fans and anyone who loves to ponder the hypothetical.

What if a book didn?t just tell you how to think or what to know, but rather encouraged you to think for yourself? What if there was a book that focused on asking questions instead of just answering them? The Book of What If?? does just that! What if you lived on a floating city? What if politicians were kids? What if broccoli tasted like chocolate? What if you could explore outer space? By asking these fun, open-ended questions, this book fosters greater critical thinking skills and gives kids a space to interact by breaking out a notebook to draw or write out their personal reactions, or engage in entertaining exercises with family and friends. Plus, sidebars deepen the investigation with peer-to-peer insights, historical and current profiles, real-life examples, and more, making for unlimited learning opportunities!

Why Don't Penguins' Feet Freeze? is the latest compilation of readers' answers to the questions in the 'Last Word' column of New Scientist, the world's best-selling science weekly. Following the phenomenal success of Does Anything Eat Wasps? - the Christmas 2005 surprise bestseller - this new collection includes recent answers never before published in book form, and also old favourites from the column's early days. Yet again, many seemingly simple questions turn out to have complex answers. And some that seem difficult have a very simple explanation. New Scientist's 'Last Word' is regularly voted the magazine's most popular section as it celebrates all questions - the trivial, idiosyncratic, baffling and strange. This new selection of the best is popular science at its most entertaining and enlightening.

“Big ideas that just might save the world”—The Guardian 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 anything in the world, it is that the future is going to be awful. There is an epidemic of loneliness, an epidemic of anxiety, a mental health crisis of vast proportions, especially among young people. There’s a rise in extremist movements and governments. Catastrophic climate change. Biodiversity loss. Food insecurity. The fracturing of ecosystems and communities beyond, it seems, repair. The future—to say nothing of the present—looks grim. But as Transition movement cofounder Rob Hopkins tells us, there is plenty of evidence that things can change, and cultures can change, rapidly, dramatically, and unexpectedly—for the better. He has seen it happen around the world and in his own town of Totnes, England, where the community is becoming its own housing developer, energy company, enterprise incubator, and local food network—with cascading benefits to the community that extend far beyond the projects themselves. We do have the capability to effect dramatic change, Hopkins argues, but we’re failing because we’ve largely allowed our most critical tool to languish: human imagination. As defined by social reformer John Dewey, imagination is the ability to look at things as if they could be otherwise. The ability, that is, to ask What if? And if there was ever a time when we needed that ability, it is now. Imagination is central to empathy, to creating better lives, to envisioning and then enacting a positive future. Yet imagination is also demonstrably in decline at precisely the moment when we need it most. In this passionate exploration, Hopkins asks why imagination is in decline, and what we must do to revive and reclaim it. Once we do, there is no end to what we might accomplish. From What Is to What If is a call to action to reclaim and unleash our collective imagination, told through the stories of individuals and communities around the world who are doing it now, as we speak, and witnessing often rapid and dramatic change for the better.

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 turn her world into a canvas. And if everything around her is taken away, she'll sing, dance, and dream... Stunning mixed media illustrations, lyrical text, and a breathtaking gatefold conjure powerful magic in this heartfelt affirmation of art, imagination, and the resilience of the human spirit.

New York Times bestselling author Jason Pargin’s hilarious and horrifying John Dies at the End series continues with If This Book Exists, You’re in the Wrong Universe. "Pargin once again delights with scathing social commentary thinly disguised as an outrageous action novel...This is a feast."—Publishers Weekly "Within the snarky humor is an incisive commentary on social media and the state of our connected world, and a story about trauma and how people lash out when they’re hurt...This isn’t just a funny tale of inept supernatural investigators; it’s a story of people struggling through pain to find a better path. Pargin offers us a welcome note of hope." — Booklist If the broken neon signs, shuttered storefronts, and sub-standard housing didn’t tip you off, you’ve just wandered into the city of “Undisclosed”. You don’t want to be caught dead here, because odds are you just might find yourself rising from the grave. That hasn’t stopped tourists from visiting to check out the unusual phenomena that hangs around our town like radioactive fallout. Interdimensional parasites feeding on human hosts, paranormal cults worshipping demonic entities, vengeful teenage sorcerers, we’ve got it all. Did I mention the possessed toy? It’s a plastic football-sized egg that’s supposed to hatch an adorable, colorful stuffed bird when a child “feeds” it through a synchronized smartphone app. What’s actually inside is an otherworldly monstrosity that’s enticing impressionable wayward youth into murdering folks and depositing their body parts inside the egg as if it’s a hungry piggy bank to trigger the end of the world. That’s where Dave, John, and Amy come in. They face supernatural threats so the rest of us don’t have to—and sometimes even earn a couple of bucks to so do. But between the bloody ritual sacrifices and soul-crushing nightmares, our trio realizes this apocalypse is way above their pay grade.

Through bittersweet, simple illustrations and playfully poignant messages, anartist maps out the road to recovery after a breakup.

In an elegant, two-color format, punctuated with intriguing drawings, If . . . poses hundreds of questions ranging from practical to maddening, moral to hilarious. If you could spend one whole night alone with anyone in history, whom would you choose? If you could suddenly possess an extraordinary talent in one of the arts, which would you like it to be? If you could commit one crime without being caught, what crime would you commit? If your plane were about to crash and you had time to write one quick note, to whom would you write, and what would you say? If you could run any single company, institution, or organization in the world, which would you choose? These are but a few of the five hundred provocative queries from If . . . (Questions for the Game of Life). If . . . can be a wonderful after-dinner parlor game; it can serve as an icebreaker between new acquaintances; it can even help you better understand yourself, your dreams and aspirations, and the mysteries of life. After the hours of inquisitive thoughts and revelations inspired by If . . . (Questions for the Game of Life), you'll wonder, “If I had never picked up this book, what would have happened to me?”

This book explores the merkey areas of perception, opinion, and propoganda that tend to blind us to objectivity thus enslaving us in someone else's idea of what is good and bad, right and wrong, truth and fiction, etc. (Please e-mail [email protected] for access to the DontReadThisBook reference materials web site)

Mr. Book With No Story wants his pages uncluttered by pictures and plot lines, but images, questions, and ideas keep invading the unruly pages he is trying to police, ignoring his efforts to chase them away. Mr. Book is determined to share nothing with readers, but his pages have other ideas. It turns out that Mr. Book’s big fear is having nothing worthwhile to say, but in this fun, zany tribute to the creative process, he needn’t have worried. The bumbling blowhard of the first page inspires empathy and affection by the time the last page chimes in. The messages are simple: Stories are fun, and all of us can tell them.