Randall Munroe is a former NASA roboticist who, on a typical day, puzzles over absurd hypothetical questions about science, many of which come in from fans of his blog What If? For example, he spent several days trying to answer “If all digital data in the world were stored on punch cards, how big would Google's data warehouse be?” If you’ve ever watched his TED talk, you know how that one ended. Here he talks about concepts from his latest book,Thing Explainer, which uses the 1,000 (or, rather, ten hundred) most common words in the English language to explain complex concepts.
Expertise: computer science, technology, mathematics, science, webcomics, robotics