How To

Absurd scientific advice for common real-world problems

by Randall Munroe

Hardcover, 307 pages

English language

Published March 18, 2019 by John Murray.

ISBN:: 978-1-4736-8032-6

(15 reviews)

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.

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

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 readers. As he did so brilliantly in What If?, Munroe invites us to explore the most absurd reaches of the possible. Full of clever infographics and amusing illustrations, How To is a delightfully mind-bending way to better understand the science and technology underlying the things we do every day

7 editions

Soh Kam Yung reviewed How To: Absurd Scientific Advice for Common Real-World Problems by Randall Munroe

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)

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 end of the book, you will definitely have learned to how to do tasks in the strangest ways physically possible.

As a disclaimer, the author does recommend at the start that you really shouldn't try to do what he suggests in the book, as they are supposed to be hypothetical exercises; or the author would like you to think that.

Throughout the book, the author's signature stick figures doing unusual things are featured, giving you an idea of what's in store if you actually did try to do what is suggested in the book.

Nicolas Delsaux reviewed How To: Absurd Scientific Advice for Common Real-World Problems by Randall Munroe

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

4 stars

Randall Munro cherche dans ce livre les réponses les plus loufoques à des questions simples.
Pour donner un exemple, quand il se demande comment arriver à l'heure à un rendez-vous, son premier réflexe est de tenter de ralentir l'écoulement du temps.
Donc, ce sont globalement des méthodes de l'ordre de la triche. Mais des méthodes qui impliquent globalement beaucoup de science. Et c'est très cool, parce que ça envoie le lecteur dans des directions totalement inattendues (mais souvent relativistes).
Comme pour "Et si...", j'ai beaucoup aimé le ton et le sujet. Le bouquin est vraiment très sympa à picorer.