And I love that– my most favorite part of this, so it’s like a blueprint page. IRA: I’m looking at the page of the Saturn V which you call the US Space Teams Up Goer 5. And then that got me thinking, could I describe the whole thing that way with just simple dumb words. And I felt like Up Goer where was about the dumbest name I could think of.

And so I started calling them things like Up Goer and Flying Tube. And I was just trying to give them the dumbest names I possibly could because I got tired of majestic names like Falcon or Apollo or whatever. But that actually came from when I was playing a space video game where I had to name space ships. It goes back to a comic I drew where I tried to explain the Saturn V in just the 1,000 most common words. IRA: Well, you do amazing things in this book, Thing Explainer. RANDALL: You know, I think I heard it years ago. Randall Munroe is the creator of the popular web comic XKCD and the author of The Thing Explainer: Complicated Stuff in Simple Words.

Complicated things like laptops and jet engines and electromagnetic spectrum explained using pictures and just the thousand most common English words. Well, my next guest answers these questions and a whole lot more in his new book. The editor lost the bet, and the world got a little book called Green Eggs and Ham, proving once again that you don’t need a lot of big words to tell a good story.īut do you need big words to explain, say, a complicated science concept? Or advanced technology? Can you talk about the functioning of an animal cell without mitochondria? Or about the inside of a nuclear reactor without uranium? Sounds like a question for the Flame Challenge. The editor bet Suess that he could not write a story, a good one, with just 50 unique words. Seuss, the famous author, and his editor.

There’s a story about a wager between Dr.

Xkcd tiny piano