How To: Absurd Scientific Advice for Common Real-World Problems
Written by Randall Munroe
Narrated by Wil Wheaton
4.5/5
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Currently unavailable
Currently unavailable
About this audiobook
The world's most entertaining and useless self-help guide, from the brilliant mind behind the wildly popular webcomic xkcd and the #1 New York Times bestsellers 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 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.
Editor's Note
Editor’s pick…
If you genuinely want to know how to solve common problems, this is not the book for you. If you want to know how to become a mad scientist and destroy the universe, you’ve come to the right place. Randall Munroe (of xkcd fame) will have you in stitches as you learn the very serious science behind the worst ways to solve everyday problems.
Randall Munroe
Randall Munroe is the author of the webcomic xkcd and the New York Times bestsellers What If?, What If? 2, Thing Explainer, and How To. A former NASA roboticist, he left the agency in 2006 to draw comics on the internet full time. The International Astronomical Union has named an asteroid after him; that asteroid, 4942 Munroe, is large enough that it could cause a mass extinction if it were to hit Earth. He lives in Massachusetts.
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Reviews for How To
29 ratings2 reviews
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Mostly understandable. Some equations. Some questions were interesting some not.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Thoroughly enjoyed it. And learned how to win at tag while I was at it.
1 person found this helpful