How To: Absurd Scientific Advice for Common Real-World Problems
Randall Munroe
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 ExplainerFor 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. more
308 pages, Hardcover
First published Riverhead Books
4.16
Rating
19453
Ratings
1847
Reviews
Randall Munroe
19 books 5202 followers
Randall Munroe, a former NASA roboticist, is the creator of the webcomic xkcd and the author of xkcd: volume 0. The International Astronomical Union recently named an asteroid after him; asteroid 4942 Munroe is big enough to cause a mass extinction if it ever hits a planet like Earth. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.Community reviews
3. 75 stars If you’re worried that the house will blow away, or that some prankster will attach jet engines and send it blasting off into the distance. Then this is the book for you. If you have ever been curious about how to dig a hole, how to cross a river or how to jump really high - then look no further. If you want to beat a high jumper, you have two options:1. more
Nonfiction books that are based on answering questions in unconventional ways, giving different answers to one question like in John Brockman´s series, extrapolating ideas and general taking the boooooring out of science, are a great way to get everyone fascinated. This book has some crazy, but well explained and profound ideas for more or less daily problems and gets one interested in the technology and physics of many ignored details of life. Mind games, creativity techniques, free associations and simple experimentation are keystones of both science education and real, practiced science. Outgoing from the ideas of this book, one could go outside inside a complex building, nature, a social machinery, virtual (worlds)ly everywhere and simply try some unconventional approach to functioning systems. Once with a focus on maximal productivity, another time on the highest grade of silliness. more
How to Read This BookYou may think that reading this book is easy, and all you have to do is let your eyes move over the words in the right order while paying attention. You probably expect that method to work and not take more than a few hours. On the other hand, suppose that the only language you know is Kalaallisut, an Inuit-Aleut language spoken by about 50,000 people most of whom live in Greenland. Kalaallisut and English are completely different, and if you only know Kalaallisut you probably won't be able to make sense of the book at all except for a bit you might be able to figure out from looking at the xkcd-style pictures. If you said you'd read it, other Greenlanders would laugh at you. more
Many thanks to Brooke at Penguin Random House for sending me a copy in exchange for an honest reviewSo… How To. I didn’t love it but I didn’t hate it. I painfully choose to give this 3. 5 stars. I am honestly as shocked as the rest of you. more
Did you ever wonder how to build a lava moat around your house or how to send a package from space. Well, you're in luck. Randall Munroe's How To: Absurd Scientific Advice for Common Real-World Problems explains how to do these and several other weird things you might have wondered about. I'm not saying you're weird if you've pondered these things; I'm saying they're weird questions. Don't blame me: The author himself claims they're absurd. more
As always, when I read a funny book, BUT I'm also listening to a narration by Wil Wheaton, I'm suddenly nearly incapable of figuring out whether I love the book for its content or presentation. Gaaaah. Fortunately, I had a great time with both, seamlessly upping my chuckle factor by a few magnitudes as I learn how wrong it would be to make a really, really huge teakettle. *hint* (the rivers of lava might make your homeowner's association a bit upset. )The most fascinating feature, other than just enjoying the ride when it comes to science explaining how to do the most ABSURD things imaginable, such as transmitting data across long distances by one of the most efficient forces of nature. more
Excellent set of real life problems with unreal solutions, but all of them based on pure science. Each of them are to enjoy and think about. more
So much about author Randall Munroe can be explained by a quote from this book:I really love that we can ask physics ridiculous questions like, “What kind of gas mileage would my house get on the highway. ” and physics has to answer us. Most of the rest can be illuminated by his approach to most topics in this book. Tongue firmly planted in cheek and nerd flag raised proudly high. Frankly, I have no idea why it's taken this long for the creator of the brilliant xkcd comic to tell us the winning strategy in football (as Randall informs us, neither the FIFA or NFL rules say anything about the use of cavalry). more
This was a lot of fun. The amount of drawings and diagrams make this feel like a textbook. If you're feeling burnt out from the typical read this makes for a great palette cleanser. The majority of chapters were filled with interesting knowledge, but I will admit there were a few duds (chapters are fairly short, so not as bad as a chapter of GoT where you truly don't care wtf happens to Sansa). I failed to click the blue asterisks in the eBook version to read the footnotes which is a considerable amount of information. more
Randall Munroe is becoming famous (notorious. ) for this type of book. Create a problem or ask a ridiculous question and then find even more ridiculous ways of “solving” that challenge. Interested in throwing things, perhaps a silver dollar across a river as George Washington was reputed to have done. Here is Munroe’s less than completely helpful advice:"This model isn’t perfect. more
A bit too sciencey for my tastes. I skimmed the math-filled parts and the rest of it just wasn't enough to tickle the funny bone. more
Randall Munroe is the author of the web site xkcd. com, The web site is a collection of science-oriented absurdist cartoons. If you have never had the opportunity to visit this web site--do so immediately. It's a lot of fun. This book follows closely on the web site's approach, and that of his previous book What If. more
you might not know how to power your house on mars but i do after reading this so yk when we are moving to mars stick with me ;). more
Munroe writes the xkcd comic, so this is humorous, but there are a lot examples of the proper use of physics. Besides, who doesn't want to explore the myriad ways to dig a hole or create a lava moat around your house. I thought I'd have to read another book in between, but between intriguing investigations & Wil Wheaton narrating, it had no trouble keeping my attention & it kept me chuckling the whole time. I'll let the ToC speak for the rest. Those marked with an arrow weren't in the audio book. more
(3. 5/5 stars) This book is so interesting and entertainingly funny lol Randall Munroe is someone you hope to meet at a party and get to laugh at his jokes while at the same time he teaches you things XDReally odd random questions providing scientific answers. You learn some random scientific facts along the way. They're questions you'd never ask but once you hear it you want to know the answer. Some of the questions are kinda boring lol but overall this book is entertaining and interesting"How to land a plane" was probably the funniest one, where he questions the first Canadian astronaut to land on the moon. more
IM SCREAMING I NEED THIS NOW INJECT THE SPILLAGE OF YOUR NERD MIND DEEP INSIDE MY CRAVING BONES. FILL ME WITH POINTLESS KNOWLEDGE. . more
Meh Really liked the author's first book, this one just was too ridiculous. I ended up skipping big sections of it. . more
I don't know how Randall does it but every single book he writes is as good as every single XKCD he puts out. Want to know how to have a pool party. It's not as easier as it sounds. First you have to build a pool, and to build a pool, you're gonna need a lot of math, and math is fun. No, seriously. more
Looking back over my year of reading, it really feels like I read more crappy books than good ones. Even the ones I enjoyed, I tended to fill my reviews with the things that were flawed and disappointing. Is it my cynicism. Is it the lurid state of book publishing these days. Well, whatever it is, this book is a refreshing remedy, and a perfect high-note to end my 2019 reading with. more
I enjoyed myself reading this book. This is the first book I read written by this author. Since this is a non fiction book, there’s no plot or main characters to talk about. How To is informative and easy to read. A lot of How tos in doing things. more
The principal problem with Randall Munroe books, is that they go by way too fast. I like to savor a good book, reading a little bit at a time, then thinking that part over for a day before going on to the next. With "how to", like its predecessor "what if", I gobbled it up in a day or two. Someone with money please fund a grant to get Mary Roach and Randall Munroe to write a series of science textbooks for junior high and high schoolers. There are chapters on how to take out a drone with a tennis ball, if you happen to be Serena Williams. more
I like this shit. So impractical. How come we didn't learn more impractical science in school. You can learn so many scientific ideas by applying them in ridiculous ways to ridiculous degrees. Instead we did shit like filling out charts of Jupiter's mass. more
Recently having read "What if. " by the same author, I expected this book to be similar to the former. That being, a funny and a little absurd book portraying science in an understandable and entertaining way. However, this one just felt very dry to me and kept dragging on and on. I caught myself merely skimming pages instead of properly reading them quite a lot because the corresponding chapter didn't capture my interest at all. more
Short, but fun. The problems covered are not really that weird, nevertheless, it's the solutions that are the real source of fun - how far Munroe's considerations go, w/o all the constraints brought by the common sense (which is completely banned here). I was listening to the audiobook version and it comes with one big pro and one big con. The pro is (obviously) Will Wheaton - super-engaged, naturally enthusiastic, a real pleasure to listen to. The con is the fact that this book would probably work much better when richly illustrated, otherwise, you need to rely on your imagination only. more
در درجه اول، خیلی بامزه بود. مخصوصا با کارتون هایی که اضافه شده بود. اما محتوای کتاب، یک سری ایده مسخره برای کارهای روزمره و گاهی غیر روزمره بود که از نظر علمی بررسی و امکانسنجی و محاسبه میشد، ولی اصولاً دلیلی نداشت از این ایده ها استفاده بشه. مثلاً برای شارژ تلفن همراه چند تا روش مثل استفاده از انرژی خورشیدی، انرژی باد، انرژی آب شیر یا حتی پله برقی رو بررسی و محاسبه کرده بود. در مجموع خوندنش سرگرمی علمی خوبی بود. more
Ein gutes und nützliches Buch. Lieblingssatz (Einstieg ins Kapitel "How to Build a Lava Moat"): "There are lots of reasons for wanting a lava moat around your house, some more practical than others. " Außerdem viele hervorragende Fußnoten. more
Quirky, funny, and at times ridiculous. I love Munroe’s sense of humor and his approach to all matters but this was just okay for me. . more
This is an abridged review, to see the full one with all the pictures please visit https://amanjareads. com/2019/12/24/ho. Randall Munroe is the engineer/cartoonist behind that science positive comic strip with the stick figures that you may have seen before. I've been a fan of his for years now. He has an absurdist sense of humor and marvelous creativity, both of which are on full display in his latest book How To. more
Read all my reviews on http://urlphantomhive. booklikes. com How to . Read This Review. Traditionally one would open the website or perhaps the app and simply read the review I am about to write. more
Rating : 3. 5 starsHave you ever wondered if you could open bottles using nuclear bombs because regular bottle openers are boring. Or how much cheese it would take to contain a pool because who needs concrete. No. Never fear. more