{"id":24182,"date":"2014-09-05T14:03:12","date_gmt":"2014-09-05T19:03:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=24182"},"modified":"2014-09-05T14:04:47","modified_gmt":"2014-09-05T19:04:47","slug":"what-if-i-read-a-book","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=24182","title":{"rendered":"What If I Read a Book?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>A friend got me <a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/gp\/product\/B00IYUYF4A\">this<\/a> as a gift.<\/p>\n<p>Randal Munroe (the <a href=\"http:\/\/xkcd.com\/\">XKCD webcomic<\/a> guy) has been doing this for a while now, and it is &#8211; no hyperbole &#8211; the highlight of my week. People email him ridiculous science questions and then he answers them. If you&#8217;re a science-lightweight like me, then this is great entertainment. If you have a science background, then I imagine these are a rich source of <a href=\"http:\/\/xkcd.com\/1318\/\">nitpick<\/a> fodder for people looking to play &#8220;stump the alleged &#8216;expert&#8217;.&#8221; And I KNOW you folks like that game. I mean, that makes sense. Being more correct than everyone else is kind of embedded in the entire premise of science, and sometimes you just can&#8217;t help yourselves. <\/p>\n<p>I was worried the book would just be a re-print of his existing questions, but there&#8217;s a lot of new material. Doing a <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Fermi_problem\">Fermi estimation<\/a>, I suppose about half-ish of the book looks new<span class='snote' title='1'>That&#8217;s not how Fermi estimation works. I know this because I&#8217;d already read the entry where he explained Fermi estimation.<\/span>. <\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s really good. The only downside is that you can&#8217;t hover over images for mouseover text<span class='snote' title='2'>Sometimes the images have captions instead. You know, like they were made by SAVAGES.<\/span> Also, you can&#8217;t click on footnotes<span class='snote' title='3'>Like this one.<\/span> to get the detail<span class='snote' title='4'>Can these things still be called footnotes when they don&#8217;t reside at the foot of the page?<\/span>, but must manually move your eyeballs to the bottom of the page<span class='snote' title='5'>LIKE A SAVAGE.<\/span>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A friend got me this as a gift. Randal Munroe (the XKCD webcomic guy) has been doing this for a while now, and it is &#8211; no hyperbole &#8211; the highlight of my week. People email him ridiculous science questions and then he answers them. If you&#8217;re a science-lightweight like me, then this is great [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-24182","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24182","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=24182"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24182\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=24182"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=24182"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=24182"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}