How To

Absurd Scientific Advice for Common Real-World Problems from Randall Munroe of xkcd

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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.

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 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. And if you want to get rid of this 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 vapour, 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 readers. 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.

(P)2019 Penguin Random House Audio©2019 xkcd inc

Personal Development

Physics

Science

Funny

Aviation

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Critic reviews

Ridiculous, delightful and, damn it, educational

A pure delight, a salty-sweet mixture of hard science and bonkers whimsy

Extremely accurate and often amusing answers to everyday issues

Consistently fascinating and entertaining

The creator of the popular, extremely excellent webcomic xkcd cleverly illustrates a guide of complicated solutions to simple tasks as common as digging a hole

[How To] tackles problems from the mundane-such as how to move to a new house-to those that may trouble a mad scientist building her first lava moat. The solutions are often hilariously, and purposefully, absurd. Embedded in these solutions, however, is solid scientific, engineering, and experimental understanding . . . [for] anyone who appreciates science-based solutions to life's problems

A witty, educational examination of 'unusual approaches to common tasks' . . . generously laced with dry humor . . . Munroe's comic stick-figure art is an added bonus. . . . Apart from generating laughter, the book also manages to achieve his serious objective: to get his audience thinking

A gleefully nerdy hypothetical instruction book for armchair scientists of all ages

An enjoyable treat for fans of logic puzzles, brain hacking, kaizen, mad science, and other forms of mental stimulation

Required reading across the world

A great deal of fun

Fascinating

Most relevant

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.