Elephants in a Hailstorm...With Explosives

Or something like that.

When it's prefaced by:

Do not try any of this at home. The author of this book is an Internet cartoonist, not a health or safety expert. He likes it when things catch fire or explode, which means he does not have your best interests in mind.

You know it's going to be interesting to say the least.

Not usually something I would gravitate towards, but came across Randall Munroe's What If? Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions while seeking books to add to my growing to read list [will neither confirm nor deny whether that's longer than my already read list...]. Some of the lingo sailed right over my not-so-scientifically-minded brain, but was entertaining all the same.

Probably my favorite question covered (all of which were posited to the author via email) was something like, "what would happen if you gathered a mole (extremely large unit of measurement) of moles (underground animals) into one place?" Basically they'd have to form their own planet made up entirely of moles because they would most certainly cover the entire face of earth and then some. Oh, and they'd all die. Who doesn't need yet another microchip to add to the megacomputer of useless information tucked away in that cranial basement? [Are you sold yet?].

Whatever your preferences, a change of pace can be nice. If you're also a weird---pardon me, quirky---person, you'll get a kick out of this and probably learn some interesting tidbits about science that may or may not turn out to be useful. Who knows?

On a deeper note, Munroe was quite right in prefacing his book with "explosions ahead." A good half of the scenarios discussed ended in nuclear-bomb-type disasters. A bit dark, but also rather telling since many of these questions involved environmental stimuli (ex. what if the earth stopped spinning but the atmosphere surrounding it kept moving?). The universe is a bit like a tower of Jenga blocks when you stop to think about it. Except unlike real Jenga, you can't remove even one block without tumbling the whole thing. Such precision went into the creation of the universe that even a planet a few degrees off its axis equals calamity

But surely we crawled out of sludge?