Yellowstone Geysers

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The geysers, they're erupting water that's really super heated. It's coming out going on the order of 50 to 100 meters per second. If you took a direct hit from the stream and stood over it with an umbrella or something, it could absolutely fling you very high into the air. And so my big takeaway from reading this is like, if you ever go to Yellowstone, they've got railings, just stay behind the railings.

What’s the fastest way to get a human being around a racetrack, if we ignore all the rules of racing? How many pages would you have to read to absorb all of the government laws that apply to you? It’s hard to imagine a better person to tackle these kinds of slightly-askew questions than Randall Munroe, creator of the xkcd webcomic. He collected some answers in his book What If?, and has released a sequel, What If? 2. We dive into how one goes about choosing the right questions and answering them, and how to make it funny along the way.

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Randall Munroe received a degree in physics from Christopher Newport University, before working for a while at NASA’s Langley Research Center. He is now the creator of xkcd and the author of several books. What If? and What If? 2 are based on a regular feature in which he tackles questions asked by readers.

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