Randall "XKCD" Munroe's next book has been announced: How To: Absurd Scientific Advice for Common Real-World Problems, a sequel of sorts to his 2014 book What If?: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions, spun out of his wonderful XKCD spinout site. It's out on Sept 3, and the publisher's description makes it (as Kottke says) an instant pre-order: "For any task you might want to do, there's a right way, a wrong way, and a way so monumentally bad that no one would ever try it. How To is a guide to the third kind of approach. It's full of highly impractical advice for everything from landing a plane to digging a hole." Read the rest

The latest XKCD strip, "Sharing Options/#2016" is a brilliant and trenchant surfacing of the hidden rhetoric of social media, where your options are "permanently share with billions of people, including internet scammers, random predatory companies, and hostile foreign governments" or "a small set of 300 or so approved friends," and when this is questioned, the social media companies profess an inability to understand what other options could exist. Read the rest

This xkcd comic reminds me of the way I make up my mind about things, and also how easy it is for other people to convince me to change my mind based on their curve-fitting biases. Read the rest

Over at XKCD, Randall Munroe's predicted the Critical Vulnerabilities and Exposures for 2018, with some pretty solid predictions (especially under the tooltip, which finally reveals a secret that many of us have kept mum about for literal decades -- damn you, Munroe!). Read the rest

When you lose a phone you have limited options, like disabline it or taking remote photos. Cartoonist XKCD created a lost phone security system that I would love to have. Read the rest

Randal Munroe nails it again in an XKCD installment that expresses the likelihood that your houseguests will be able to connect to your wifi (I confess to having been the "firmware" guide -- but also, having been reminded to do something about my own firmware when other difficult houseguests came to stay). Read the rest

Randall Munroe once again shows that he's one of the web's most talented storytellers, inventing ways of conveying information that use the web's affordances to novel and sharp effect (there's a reason he won a Hugo award). Read the rest

The latest XKCD is Garden, a webtoy that invites you to position lamps, adjust their spectrum and focus, and wait while your garden grows. Read the rest

Textbook giant Houghton Mifflin Harcourt publishes Randall Munroe's amazing Thing Explainer, and a lucky accident happened when someone in the textbook division noticed Munroe's amazing explanatory graphics, annotated with simple language (the book restricts itself to the thousand most common English words) and decided to include some of them in the next editions of its high-school chemistry, biology and physics textbooks. Read the rest

xkcd's infographic show the "size of the U.S.'s pipelines if each fluid produced or consumed in the U.S. had to be carried by a single pipe." Read the rest

Sgt Crispy writes, "XKCD creator Randall Munroe, has made a spiffy little hoverboard game. Looks to be small, however, when you realize that boundaries are made to be broken, A massive world opens up to be explored." Read the rest

Munroe's upcoming book, Thing Explainer, occasioned an interview in Time; in characteristically wonderful style, he answered all the questions with one-panel cartoons. (via /.) Read the rest

This week's XKCD has a hell of an Easter Egg, and it's not even in the tooltip. Read the rest

XKCD 149, AKA Sandwich, is justly treasured as a classic of nerd humor, but there are plenty of other potential punchlines. Read the rest

The XKCD Thing Explainer book -- which explains technical subjects using the thousand most common English words, in the style of Up Goer Five -- is due out in November, and Randall Munroe is going out on tour ("book trip") in November! Read the rest

Another XKCD bullseye for Randall Munroe. It's all just a tangle of things you put in to fix the things that you put in to fix the things. As the tooltip says: Read the rest

Coming this November (pre-order here), Thing Explainer expands the premise of Up Goer Five, Munroe's blueprint of the Saturn Five rocket that restricted its vocabulary to the thousand most common English words. Read the rest