xkcd [interview & book]

Of interest for xkcd fans: What If?: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions is out! Actually, it is currently the #1 bestseller on amazon! (A physics book makes it to the top of the bestseller list, a few weeks after a theoretical economics book got there. Nice! Actually, a statistics book also made it to the top: Nate Silver’s The SIgnal and the Noise….) I did not read the book, but it is made of some of the questions answered by Randall Munroe (the father of xkcd) on his what if blog. In connection with this publication, Randall Munroe is interviewed on FiveThirtyEight (Nate Silver’s website), as kindly pointed out to me by Bill Jefferys. The main message is trying to give people a feeling about numbers, a rough sense of numeracy. Which was also the purpose of the guesstimation books.