A new class of high school students are about to see lots of snarky stick figures this coming fall.
XKCD author Randall Munroe is going to be in some science textbooks.
Munroe, author of the popular webcomic, published a book last November called Thing Explainer: Complicated Stuff in Simple Words, which explains the laws of science using only the English language's 1,000 most common words. Brains became "thinking bags," and the Saturn V rocket became the "U.S. Space Team Up Goer," with diagrams and his trademark stick figures all around.
Thing Explainer also happens to be published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, a major textbook publisher. Some page proofs of the book found their way beneath the eyes of the textbook division's editors, and things seemed to click naturally from there.
So this summer, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt will release high school-level chemistry, biology and physics textbooks which incorporate parts of Munroe's book, in the hopes that his entertaining way of explaining things will help engage kids with science.
Munroe told the New York Times that he hopes his excerpts will help break up the monotony of sciences textbooks, not typically known for their sense of humor. See some included pages from Thing Explainer below, courtesy of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt:
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