Thing ExplainerBy: Randall Munroe From the No. 1 bestselling author of What If? the man who created xkcd and explained the laws of science with cartoons comes a series of brilliantly simple diagrams ('blueprints' if you want to be complicated about it) that show how important things work: from the nuclear bomb to the biro. It's good to know what the parts of a thing are called, but it's much more interesting to know what they do. Richard Feynman once said that if