You're listening to shortwave from NPR.

Okay nerds, time for a thought experiment.

Say you're trying to throw a pool party tomorrow, but your pool is missing kind of a key ingredient.

Water.

If you can't get water from, you know, there's no stream, your town water supply doesn't give you enough water pressure to fill it.

Could you just go online and order like 100,000 bottles of Fiji water.

And just empty them into the pool.

Maybe not the first thing you'd think of, but you're not Randall Monroe.

You might know him from his insanely popular webcomics, XKCD.

I'm a cartoonist and author of books about science.

This is what Randall Monroe does.

He asks questions like, what's the fastest way to fill a pool with roughly 100,000 some bottles of water?

And then that made me realize like it would take more than a day to unscrew all the bottle cut tops.

Yeah, he calculated it.

And that led me into, okay, well, wait, how do you get water out of a whole bunch of these bottles?

And that led me into reading about a government experiment where they wanted to see there's a giant report on this.

The effects of nuclear weapons on commercially packaged beverages.

Sure.

For Randall, this experiment is not about filling a pool.

It's about asking a question that leads to another question.

It reminds me a little of going on Wikipedia to read one thing and then getting interested in another.

And then another.

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