I’m a big fan of Randall Munroe and his xkcd strip.  I’m also a big fan of Up Goer 5.  So it was really nice of him to write a whole book called Thing Explainer in Up Goer 5, which is coming out next Tuesday.

If you can’t wait, he has an excerpt in the New Yorker. Here’s how it starts:

There once was a doctor with cool white hair. He was well known because he came up with some important ideas. He didn’t grow the cool hair until after he was done figuring that stuff out, but by the time everyone realized how good his ideas were, he had grown the hair, so that’s how everyone pictures him. He was so good at coming up with ideas that we use his name to mean “someone who’s good at thinking.”