Customer Reviews

How Much Does the Earth Weigh (Marshall Brain's How Stuff Works)

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Your interest in this book will depend upon how curious you are about the world around you. The people at HowStuffWorks have returned with another tome of difficult questions answered in an approachable way. (The only caveat is that the explanation does not always answer all parts of the question.)

It includes descriptions of how Caller ID works, how much "all the money in the world" is, as well as the immortal "Why is the sky blue," ending on the ambitious titular question.

This is an ideal bedside (or lav-side) book and if you are interested in trivia or how the world works, I recommend it without reservation.

This book is fun reading, especially if you have a few minutes to spare in the smallest room in your house. At the risk of sounding picky, I do have to point out that there are some obvious errors. For example: Why do US FM station frequencies always end in an odd number? The authors claim that it's just a whim that all the FM spectrum slices (0.2 MHz each) "start on odd number boundaries". But this would make the FM band extend from 88.1 to 108.1: wrong!

The true explanation is much simpler. The FM part of the spectrum extends from 88 to 108 MHz. The 0.2 MHz slices actually start on even boundaries, as you would expect: the lowest slice is from 88.0 to 88.2. A station on this slice has frequency 88.1, the CENTER (unmodulated) frequency of the slice, not the start. The last slice, of course, is from 107.8 to 108.0, with nominal frequency 107.9.