How To

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How To

By: Randall Munroe

Narrated by: Wil Wheaton

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About this listen

The world's most entertaining and useless self-help guide, from the brilliant mind behind the wildly popular webcomic xkcd and the million-selling What If? and Thing Explainer.

For any task you might want to do, there's a right way, a wrong way and a way so monumentally bad 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.

Best-selling author and cartoonist Randall Munroe explains how to predict the weather by analysing the pixels of your Facebook photos. He teaches you how to tell if you're a baby boomer or a millennial by measuring the radioactivity of your teeth. He offers tips for taking a selfie with a telescope, crossing a river by boiling it and getting to your appointments on time by destroying the moon.

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?, he 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.

Personal Development

Funny

Aviation

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Listening to Randall Munroe reminds me of Robin Williams' character in Mork and Mindy; you know the slightly erratic and highly strung alien who knows everything about the universe apart from how to interact with humans but is desperate to learn. Munroe has a similar nerdy manner that entertains the reader / listener and, although his delivery is a little strange, it is an enjoyable, if not absurd listen and you really do not know what direction he is going to go off into next. This can be exhausting trying to keep up with the author's razor sharp and fast thinking mind and I recommend reading or listening to this book in short blasts otherwise it can be overwhelming. I it stands up to a second reading too as so much of the detail can go over your head the first time around there is plenty of information layers to mine that you will be quoting for days afterwards.