How To: Absurd Scientific Advice for Common Real-World Problems
Categories: Books, Humor & Entertainment, Puzzles & Games

AN INSTANT #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER “How To will make you laugh as you learn…With How To , you can&apos;t help but appreciate the glorious complexity of our universe and the amazing breadth of humanity&apos;s effort to comprehend it. If you want some lightweight edification, you won&apos;t go wrong with How To .” — CNET “[ How To ] has science and jokes in it, so 10/10 can recommend.” —Simone Giertz The world&apos;s most entertaining and useless self-help guide from the brilliant mind behind the wildly popular webcomic xkcd and the bestsellers What If? and Thing Explainer For any task you might want to do, there&apos;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&apos;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&apos;re a baby boomer or a 90&apos;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&apos;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&apos;s mantle, or launching it into the Sun. By exploring the most complicated ways to do simple tasks, Munroe doesn&apos;t just make things difficult for himself and his readers. As he did so brilliantly in What If? , Munroe invites us to explore the most absurd reaches of the possible. Full of clever infographics and fun illustrations, How To is a delightfully mind-bending way to better understand the science and technology underlying the things we do every day.


Publisher: Riverhead Books (September 3, 2019)
Publication date: September 3, 2019
Language: English
File size: 166264 KB
Text to Speech: Enabled
Screen Reader: Supported
Enhanced typesetting: Enabled
X Ray: Enabled
Word Wise: Enabled
Sticky notes: On Kindle Scribe
Print length: 320 pages