Genres
Status
Call number
Collection
Publication
Description
Essays. Science. Nonfiction. Humor (Nonfiction.) HTML: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.… (more)
User reviews
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
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)
The last chapter was “How to Dispose of This Book.” But I read it on Kindle, so the various improbably solutions did not apply.
Generally the equations still went over my head, but ultimately everything else I understood
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.
As always with Randall Munroe, it's a lot of whimsical, deeply nerdy, and occasionally slightly alarming fun.
But, the best things about the book are it’s humor and bringing science to a level non-scientists can not
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
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.
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.
First, no matter how funny individual items are, put lots of them together and they become less funny. There are just too many of them.
Second, I read the ebook, and it is horribly formatted. The first time an image
So, if you want to read this book, (which I do recommend), you should buy a hard copy, and read a little bit at a time, with no library due date putting pressure on you.