What I Learned About the Yellowstone Geyser Explosion

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How do you find the answers to questions like this? I think at some point a useful skill in this kind of thing is being able to skim a lot of different things until you find something that's promising and then dig into it. And usually what I'll do is either skim until I just look through Google libraries. The Internet Archive has a lot of cool weird old reports on it. So really some of the best resources are just PDFs on some like defunct government website where the link is broken but you can find an archive copy.

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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