How To
Absurd Scientific Advice for Common Real-World Problems
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For any task you might want to do, there's a right way, a wrong way, and a way so monumentally complex, excessive, and inadvisable that no one would ever try it. How To is a guide to the third kind of approach. It's full of highly impractical advice for everything from landing a plane to digging a hole.
Bestselling author and cartoonist Randall Munroe explains how to predict the weather by analyzing the pixels of your Facebook photos. He teaches you how to tell if you're a baby boomer or a 90's kid by measuring the radioactivity of your teeth. He offers tips for taking a selfie with a telescope, crossing a river by boiling it, and powering your house by destroying the fabric of space-time. And if you want to get rid of the book once you're done with it, he walks you through your options for proper disposal, including dissolving it in the ocean, converting it to a vapor, using tectonic plates to subduct it into the Earth's mantle, or launching it into the Sun.
By exploring the most complicated ways to do simple tasks, Munroe doesn't just make things difficult for himself and his listeners. As he did so brilliantly in What If?, Munroe invites us to explore the most absurd reaches of the possible. How To is a delightfully mind-bending way to better understand the science and technology underlying the things we do every day.
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Creators
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Publisher
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Release date
September 3, 2019 -
Formats
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OverDrive Listen audiobook
- ISBN: 9780525635697
- File size: 180471 KB
- Duration: 06:15:58
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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If you've ever wondered how to contain an above-ground pool with just cheese, or how to open many thousands of water bottles at the same time with nuclear weapons in order to fill your pool, this is the audiobook for you. And while the audiobook cannot provide the illustrations that the physical book includes, Wil Wheaton's friendly and straightforward narration style paired with occasionally exaggerated theatrical moments more than make up for them. Wheaton's conversational tone creates an excellent juxtaposition with the author's dry humor and embellished scientific commentary, giving listeners a delightful learning experience that frequently finds them laughing out loud. A truly enjoyable listen that really delivers on its subtitle. A.K.R. © AudioFile 2019, Portland, Maine -
Starred review from June 17, 2019
Munroe (Thing Explainer), a former NASA roboticist and creator of the popular webcomic xkcd, offers a witty, educational examination of “unusual approaches to common tasks, and... what would happen to you if you tried them.” Each chapter explores scientific problems with often Rube Goldbergian solutions; in “How to Cross a River,” one could freeze the river, but, due to the second law of thermodynamics, only with a device “fed by a river of gasoline... comparable in size to the river you want to freeze.” To fill a backyard pool, one could siphon H2O from a neighbor living at a higher elevation, buy a ton of bottled water (necessitating industrial plastic shredders to efficiently extract the liquid), or create one’s own water. The text is generously laced with dry humor (“Playing the piano isn’t very hard, in the sense that the keys are all easy to reach and they don’t take very much force to push down”), and Munroe’s comic stick-figure art is an added bonus. But apart from generating laughter, the book also manages to achieve his serious objective: to get his audience thinking “of ideas and then trying to decide whether they’re good or not.” Agent: Seth Fishman, Gernert Company.
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