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How To

Absurd Scientific Advice for Common Real-World Problems from Randall Munroe of xkcd

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How To

By: Randall Munroe
Narrated by: Wil Wheaton
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About this listen

 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 if you want to get rid of this 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 vapour, 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?, 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.

(P)2019 Penguin Random House Audio©2019 xkcd inc Personal Development Physics Science Funny Aviation

Critic Reviews

Ridiculous, delightful and, damn it, educational
A pure delight, a salty-sweet mixture of hard science and bonkers whimsy
Extremely accurate and often amusing answers to everyday issues
Consistently fascinating and entertaining
The creator of the popular, extremely excellent webcomic xkcd cleverly illustrates a guide of complicated solutions to simple tasks as common as digging a hole
[How To] tackles problems from the mundane-such as how to move to a new house-to those that may trouble a mad scientist building her first lava moat. The solutions are often hilariously, and purposefully, absurd. Embedded in these solutions, however, is solid scientific, engineering, and experimental understanding . . . [for] anyone who appreciates science-based solutions to life's problems
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
A gleefully nerdy hypothetical instruction book for armchair scientists of all ages
An enjoyable treat for fans of logic puzzles, brain hacking, kaizen, mad science, and other forms of mental stimulation
Required reading across the world
A great deal of fun
Fascinating
All stars
Most relevant
The narration by Will Wheaton is really good. The writing of the book is both thought provoking and entertaining. My only problem are in a few of the chapters there a physic formula, which don’t lend well to a audiobook. Apart from that, I would recommend it.

Great

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Few books have ever made me actually laugh out loud, but Randall's books both had me in tears a few times

This was hilarious!!

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I found that i love the idea of this book but it fell short for me. Maybe next time

not great

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A truely interesting and entertaining book! Some of the examples are in feet and inches which detracts a bit from their impact on folk like myself who are use to SI units. Some of the equations don’t work well in audio format, it would’ve been better if this was provided as additional material that could be viewed. Still well worth a careful listen

Good but SI Units Would’ve Made it Great

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