Pun Salad

A Christmas gift from my generous family. I took my time working through it, because too much wonderfulness in one sitting can lessen one's overall appreciation.

It is mostly a "greatest hits" collection of Randall Munroe's entries to his What If? site. Munroe is a dedicated scientific polymath, and a fun illustrator. (I suspect that he could draw people as more than stick figures if he wanted to, but that's his schtick.)

The questions, posed by his readers/fans, are (as admitted in the subtitle) absurd, but imaginative enough that answering them can illuminate real-world science.

• If an asteroid was very small but supermassive, could you really live on it like the Little Prince?
• How hard would a puck have to be shot to be able to knock the goalie himself backward into the net?
• What if I took a swith in a typical spent nuclear fuel pool? Would I need to dive to actually experience a fatal amount of radiation? How long could I stay at the surface?

Perhaps indicating a tendency toward morbid thoughts (in Munroe or his question-submitters, probably both), a lot of the answers involve massive amounts of death and injury. (Q: What would happen if you tried to hit a baseball pitched at 90 percent of the speed of light? A (summary): you don't want to be the batter, the pitcher, a teammate, a spectator, or really anywhere within miles. Full answer here.)

Only slightly marred by some typographic flubs, where a few math symbols that were (undoubtedly) present in the font Munroe used to compose the text just appear as annoying white rectangles in the book's font. Might be corrected in a later printing.

So it's great geeky fun, but also a tutorial on how someone with a scientific bent puzzles out answers to queries. That's a skill applicable to non-absurd what-ifs too. Highly recommended.