How To

Absurd Scientific Advice for Common Real-World Problems

By: Randall Munroe

Narrated by: Wil Wheaton

Length: 6 hrs and 15 mins

Publisher's summary

The world's most entertaining and useless self-help guide, from the brilliant mind behind the wildly popular webcomic xkcd and the number one New York Times best sellers 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.

Best-selling 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 '90s 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 a 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.

©2019 Randall Munroe (P)2019 Penguin Audio

Critic reviews

“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.” (Publishers Weekly, starred review)

“Munroe (creator of the webcomic xkcd; What If?; Thing Explainer) creates another fun series of questions and answers that explore forces, properties, and natural phenomena through pop-culture scenarios.... With illustrated formulas that humorously explain the science behind Munroe’s conjectures, this book is sure to entertain and educate thinkers from high school on up.” (Library Journal)

“The mind behind the webcomic xkcd provides a slew of hilariously overcomplicated instructions for everything from throwing a pool party to winning an election, bringing his signature stick figures - and his singular wit - along for the ride. How To is a loving testament to the power of the human brain to take things to absurd lengths.” (Glen Weldon, NPR)

Best book ever

My favorite book on audible. So many ways to be silly. Just my kind of book silly funny and a tiny bit of smarty.

Fantastic, Fun, and Fascinating

The book was an amazing read. The wacky, weird, and wonderful thought experiments posited throughout are both fun, and keep the reader engaged. I would definitely recommend this book for anyone who's interested in STEM and looking for a good laugh.

review

liked Matt Parker or freakonomics better, but this book was ok. more goofy but it's from a comic guy so... duh?

Decent read

It wasn’t as interesting to me as the last book but it’s entertaining none the less. I didn’t quite follow the order of the book at all.

Very very very good!!!

Funny ,super good ,especially the president part and very good job and I hope you make more

- Daddy? - Yes? - I want to be a scientist.

The book brings up some important questions as well as puts you in awe about the ways you can use a lot of regular stuff.

you know all those questions you had as a kid?

Here are some of the answers in an entertaining way :)
Well worth the read.
:))

Funny, but hard to follow

Quite hard to follow since it keeps mixing standard metric units with historical British imperial units.

How to enjoy books.

To enjoy books you first must find the right book. Fortunately, you have already found the perfect book if you're reading this review. Get the damn book.

Great follow up to the first book!

Randall does great, as always, though I feel this would have been better in print, as it has the XKCD comics in it. Perhaps a link included with the audible to see the comics online. But overall, it was very enjoyable, and I learned some very random facts because of it.