Cracked.com is a comedy website. It is low-brow comedy to boot, but I believe that in recent years the website has undergone an incredible change. The site employs all kinds of writers who specialize in just about every topic imaginable. They publish editorially selected articles from freelance writers also. One can learn about nearly everything at Cracked.com. They have a sports writer, an astrophysicist, a martial arts expert, many pop culture guru’s, several graduates of theological seminary, and political science experts. More important than any of this, however, is the fact that they are all hilarious. All of them are hilarious, and the best of them have gotten together and written a masterful book that can teach young adults incredible things about a variety of important topics.
There are many sections that deal with the development of science. One example is On Sphere Making by Archimedes. This book contained most of the theoretical work of his later years. While nearly all of this book was destroyed in the fires that destroyed the Library of Alexandria, we have two sources that tell us what was in the book. One source is the glowing review from Pappus of Alexandria in which he describes with awe the astrological clocks designed by Archimedes. It is possible based on this description that On Sphere Making contained blueprints for the famous Antikythera Mechanism. The other source is a few pages of the actual book that have been found recently on which is written a method developed by Archimedes of calculating the area beneath a curve! In other words Archimedes was well on his way to discovering integral Calculus 1700 years before Leibniz.
Another important theme in the book is on Biology. The book deconstructs popular notions of how different species of Dinosaurs looked and behaved. It describes the discoveries in China connected to Tyrannosaurus Rex fossils of feathers. In the last decade, in other words, we have discovered that Tyrannosaurus Rex were covered in feathers. Also the book explained that for some time the aggressive, carnivorous, behavior of Tyrannosaurs has been called into question. The short arms of the species indicate that they likely were unable to hunt or kill large game, but were shy scavengers. At the same time that the authors break the readers heart by shattering the fierce T. Rex persona, they demonstrate that much of the fossil record is much more amazing than normally assumed. For example there is Titanoboa, which was 40-50 feet long and weighed in at 2500 pounds. There is also Argentavis Magnificens, the largest flying creature to ever live on the planet. It had a wingspan of 26 feet and a total wing area of seventy five feet. This made it only slightly smaller than a leer-jet.
The facts in the book are incredible, and always entertaining, but they are not the most important less on The De-Textbook. The authors have a specific rhetorical message throughout the book. To grasp this message, as well as the clever wordplay of the book, a direct quote would serve best: “Teachers are fighting a nonstop battle to bring the energy in the room down to their level, which meant there was some stuff they couldn’t tell you about. Because the truth is, and don’t tell them we told you this, the world around you is f*#&ing amazing” (O'Brien, 2013, p. 1) . In other words, in addition to the comedic and engaging explanation of some of the most important facts and figures of all time, the book teaches young adults the most important message of all: the world is amazing, and the more curious one remains about it, the more amazing it will become.
Bibliography
O'Brien, D. (2013). The De-Textbook: The Stuff You Didn't Know About the Stuff You Thought You Knew. (J. O'Brien, & D. Wong, Eds.) New York: Penguin Group.
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