How To

Absurd Scientific Advice for Common Real-World Problems

Paperback, 308 pages

English language

Published Sept. 5, 2019 by Hodder & Stoughton.

ISBN:
978-1-4736-8033-3
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4 stars (57 reviews)

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 …

7 editions

How to get things done in absurb ways.

4 stars

A very entertaining book about how to solve 'common' problems in unusual ways that don't break the laws of physics. In a series of mostly short stand-alone chapters (which occasionally refer the reader to other chapters for related how-tos), you may learn:

  • how to either solve common day problems in unusual ways (how to play a piano that can play notes from the sub-sonic to ultrasonic range, or charge your phone when there are no power outlets)
  • how to logically think about common actions (how far you could actually throw various things, from coins to footballs)
  • how to do absurd things (like landing a plane on a ski slope, or build a lava moat)

The chapters are mostly unconnected to each other, making it easy to read the book chapter by chapter, while allowing you to digest the humour and strangeness of each way to achieve a task. By the …

Review of 'How To: Absurd Scientific Advice for Common Real-World Problems' on 'Goodreads'

5 stars

This book was amazing! It met my expectations and I actually learned a few new things. I finally understand how relativity applies to the speed of light and learned that the US Secretary of Transportation can unilaterally move territories between time zones.

I thoroughly recommend this book!

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Subjects

  • Science, miscellanea
  • Problem solving
  • Humor, form, trivia

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