How To: Absurd Scientific Advice for Common Real-World Problems

Written by Randall Munroe

Narrated by Wil Wheaton

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Hachette UK Audio
• Release date: Sep 3, 2019
• ISBN: 9781473680364

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.

Reviews for How To

[murderbydeath · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

If you've ever read Randall Munroe's xkcd website, or his first book, What If? you know what to expect from How To...If you haven't, and you like physics, or imagining really weird scenarios and outrageous, possibly dangerous or lethal solutions to ordinary problems, or both, I definitely recommend checking this book out.  It's exactly what it says on the tin: common problems that the author has unleashed his imagination (or the imagination of others) on to create the most absurd possible solutions.  We're talking level 10 absurdity, but there's also a lot of excellent science in these absurd solutions and solid explanations why these solutions wouldn't work that range from "it would take more money than you'd save" (digging for treasure), to "this will likely kill you" (surviving re-entry of the ISS), to "the end of life - and the universe - as we know it" (triggering vacuum decay to power your house).I kept thinking as I was reading this that it would make a really fun supplementary text in high school physics.  Want to increase uptake of STEM subjects?  Show kids how to figure out the end of the universe, or how much fuel it would take to send their house into space.

[adzebill · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

In the vein of What If, short absurd thought experiments that demonstrate scientific thinking and its usefulness in solving problems that will never, ever, be encountered (like how to cool your house when you've surrounded it with a lava moat). Munroe's use of relentless physics extrapolation is very effective and affecting: we start for example with a magic scooter that can accelerate at 1G (forever) so we make our doctor's appointment on time, and finish, unexpectedly, at the end of the universe. Delightful.

[bodagirl · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Some section were slower than others, some were more ridiculous than others, but I think the quote that best describes this book is, "I really love that we can ask physics ridiculous questions... and physics has to answer us."

[sara_cat-107388 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

One of the wonderful things about this book is that each chapter stands fully on its own. So you can read in order or just pick based on the topic that interests you most at a given moment.But, the best things about the book are it’s humor and bringing science to a level non-scientists can not just understand but also find themselves pulled into. My biggest note to anyone who hasn’t read it yet: read the footnotes. There are true gems in them.

[narilka · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Have you ever wondered if you could open bottles using nuclear bombs because regular bottle openers are boring? Or how much cheese it would take to contain a pool because who needs concrete? No? Never fear! Randall Munroe has you covered in his book How To: Absurd Scientific Advice for Common Real-world Problems. The title really says it all on this one.It's an entertaining and silly read. Scenarios in the book include:• How to jump really high• How to land a plane• How to dig a hole• How to get rid of a book (the horror!)You get the idea. Problems that don't really need solving but if you did want a highly impractical solution, Randall Munroe is your man! He also provides the mundane, boring solutions to each problem first for comparison.I listened to the the audio book narrated by Wil Wheaton. He gives a fantastic delivery as always with spot on comedic timing.As enjoyable as this was to listen to, turns out I preferred the bonkers scenarios in What If much more. Either way, I hope Munroe keeps writing these types of science books. Science can be fun. Wish it was taught this way in school when I was growing up.

[disarmadillo · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Entertaining.

[ladyars · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Super entertaining and really easy to follow along with a basic knowledge of physics.

[paul_s-289480 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Too short.

[jpsnow · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The comic behind xkcd explores a range of everyday concepts from a curious, scientific perspective. If you're the type of person who wonders about the physics involved in moving yourself, your stuff, or even house, this book has the answers. It also has advice in case you ever need to land a plane, even if you're trapped on the outside of it.

[mithril_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Excellent as always!

[benkline · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A hilarious and fun, and educational book all at the same time. By taking a look at the absurdity of things and doing it in a fun way, I learned more about physics than if taught "correctly" like in school.

Generally the equations still went over my head, but ultimately everything else I understood (...pretty much). Each chapter was interesting and entertaining with lots of fun educational ideas that are completely impractical.

Well worth a read for anyone looking for some math and physics based humor, and a good jumping off point for teaching HS students math and physics and learning about science.

[dmturner · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

An extended exercise in solemn engineering-style whimsy, complete with footnotes and cartoons, by one of my favorite cartoonists. Procedure: Think of an ordinary task, such as how to charge your phone, and without even considering any of the usual everyday solutions, delineate the most workable but absurd possible answers. The astronaut Chris Hadfield was enlisted at one point, and later the tennis champion Serena Williams (to see how efficiently a tennis serve could disable a drone). At times the book was a bit of a slog but it was genuinely worth the read if only for the trivia I learned along the way.

The last chapter was “How to Dispose of This Book.” But I read it on Kindle, so the various improbably solutions did not apply.

[ritaer_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Illustrated with the stick figures of the xkcd comic strip, this book uses absurd examples to convey interesting science, both the facts and the means by which they are derived. Educational and fun--good gift fot the nerd in your family.

[askelmore · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Best for:People who like science and humor.In a nutshell:Author Munroe takes on everyday problems like ‘How to Move’ with increasingly absurd advice like ‘get a bunch of helicopters to do that’, and then explains the science behind it.Worth quoting:When discussing using trained birds of prey to knock drones out of the sky: “…but any plan that calls for countering rogue machines by training animals to hurl themselves at them is probably a bad one. We wouldn’t enforce speed limits by training cheetahs to leap onto motorcycles.”Why I chose it:I enjoyed his previous two books.Review:This book is absurd. That’s not an insult; it’s literally in the title. But absurd is delightful, as Munroe uses physics and other science to offer up silly solutions to problems. For example, what if you need to knock a drone out of the sky? Why not ask Serena Williams to see how many tries it takes a professional tennis player to hit a tennis ball at it? (He did, and she obliged, because she continues to be amazing.) Or what if you need to charge your phone at the airport - any way to harness the energy from the moving escalators?You aren’t going to actually use any of the advice in this book, but that’s not the point. The point is to incorporate science into our understanding of the world. And it’s once again a clever way to do that. Munroe is a talented teacher, and I’ll probably always buy his books, though Thing Explainer is still my favorite.I lost a bit of steam reading this book. I started out reading a few chapters before bed each night, and I should have stuck with that. It’s PERFECT for that. It’s not a political book that’s going to rile you up so much you can’t sleep and while some chapters are so funny that you want to keep reading, it’s not like a novel where you just need to know what happens next. My issue came when I tried reading it at other times of the day. I just couldn’t get into it. So, definitely check it out if it sounds interesting, but consider it an ‘over time’ not an ‘all at once’ read.Keep it / Pass to a Friend / Donate it / Toss it:Pass to a Friend (my partner)

[bookczuk · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

XKCD explanation heaven.

[rivkat_2 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Witty scientific explorations of how to do silly things like filling a swimming pool with bottled water. It was as well-done as previous volumes, but it was hard not to read an undercurrent of doubt about whether we as a species/planet will survive the next few hundred years in anything like our current state of capability.

[guide2_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Funny as always with lots of interesting scientific insight!

[bragan_8 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The latest work of scientific insanity by xkcd cartoonist Randall Munroe purports to offer up "absurd scientific advice for common real-world problems." Some chapters do precisely that, such as the one that suggests filling a swimming pool by purchasing hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of bottled water and then opening the bottles using a nuclear weapon. Some -- OK, a very few -- might actually be kind of handy, such as the chapter that offers up a fairly simple formula for estimating how far anyone can throw any object. (You can play around with that one a bit here.) Others -- lots of others -- illustrate interesting scientific principles by contemplating ridiculous extreme possibilities. Pretty much all of them are very much Do Not Try This at Home. Seriously, please do not destroy any moons of Mars in an attempt to power your house. Thank you.As always with Randall Munroe, it's a lot of whimsical, deeply nerdy, and occasionally slightly alarming fun.