How to Absurd scientific advice for common real-world problems

Randall Munroe

Book - 2019

"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. [This book] 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." -- From book jacket flap.

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Subjects
Published
New York : Riverhead Books, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC 2019.
Language
English
Main Author
Randall Munroe (author)
Physical Description
307 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references (pages [292]-299) and index.
ISBN
9780525537090
  • Introduction
  • 1. How to Jump Really High
  • 2. How to Throw a Pool Party
  • 3. How to Dig a Hole
  • 4. How to Play the Piano
  • How to Listen to Music
  • 5. How to Make an Emergency Landing
  • 6. How to Cross a River
  • 7. How to Move
  • 8. How to Keep Your House from Moving
  • How to Chase a Tornado
  • 9. How to Build a Lava Moat
  • 10. How to Throw Things
  • 11. How to Play Football
  • 12. How to Predict the Weather
  • How to Go Places
  • 13. How to Play Tag
  • 14. How to Ski
  • 15. How to Mail a Package
  • 16. How to Power Your House (on Earth)
  • 17. How to Power Your House (on Mars)
  • 18. How to Make Friends
  • How to Blow out Birthday Candies
  • How to Walk a Dog
  • 19. How to Send a File
  • 20. How to Charge Your Phone
  • 21. How to Take a Selfie
  • 22. How to Catch a Drone
  • 23. How to Tell If You're a Nineties Kid
  • 24. How to Win an Election
  • 25. How to Decorate a Tree
  • How to Build a Highway
  • 26. How to Get Somewhere Fast
  • 27. How to Be On Time
  • 28. How to Dispose of This Book
  • Acknowledgements
  • References
  • Index
  • How to Change a Light Bulb
Review by Booklist Review

Munroe's latest collection of scientific miscellany, after Thing Explainer (2015), is, as he writes in the introduction, a book of bad ideas. To be fair, the ideas are not bad chapters covering how to jump really high, cross a river, and charge a phone, for example, seem innocuously useful it's the solutions that manage to push credulity while being completely scientifically sound. Peppered with Munroe's signature stick-figure drawings (well known to fans of his webcomic, xkcd), historical facts, and snarky footnotes, the book uses math and physics to follow the logical progression from how to throw a pool party to how thick a wall of cheese you will need to build a pool adequate for a pool party or, in an interview with astronaut Chris Hadfield, how to make an emergency landing on a ski jump. His boundless curiosity takes a surprisingly emotional turn in How to Make Friends, which quickly goes from the geometry of random collisions to the simple-yet-complicated truth behind human interaction. How To is a gleefully nerdy hypothetical instruction book for armchair scientists of all ages.--Susan Maguire Copyright 2010 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Munroe (Thing Explainer), a former NASA roboticist and creator of the popular webcomic xkcd, offers a witty, educational examination of "unusual approaches to common tasks, and... what would happen to you if you tried them." Each chapter explores scientific problems with often Rube Goldbergian solutions; in "How to Cross a River," one could freeze the river, but, due to the second law of thermodynamics, only with a device "fed by a river of gasoline... comparable in size to the river you want to freeze." To fill a backyard pool, one could siphon H2O from a neighbor living at a higher elevation, buy a ton of bottled water (necessitating industrial plastic shredders to efficiently extract the liquid), or create one's own water. The text is generously laced with dry humor ("Playing the piano isn't very hard, in the sense that the keys are all easy to reach and they don't take very much force to push down"), and Munroe's comic stick-figure art is an added bonus. But apart from generating laughter, the book also manages to achieve his serious objective: to get his audience thinking "of ideas and then trying to decide whether they're good or not." Agent: Seth Fishman, Gernert Company. (Sept.)

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal 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. This professed book of "bad ideas" aims to encourage readers to reach for revolutionary ideas by considering unusual and fun approaches. Calculating how thick a wall of cheese would need to be to support an above-ground pool leads to a discussion of nuclear weapons testing and the engineering disaster that formed California's Salton Sea. There are instructions on how to ski, examine the friction of wax, limits of speed skiing, and the fastest way to make snow. Guest contributors, such as astronaut Chris Hadfield and tennis star Serena Williams, offer expertise on how to hit targets and make emergency landings. VERDICT 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.--Catherine Lantz, Univ. of Illinois at Chicago Lib.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review

Former NASA robotics scientist Munroe (Thing Explainer: Complicated Stuff in Simple Words, 2015, etc.), the genius behind the xkcd stick-figure webcomic, considers unlikely solutions to common problems.Say you want to have a pool party. You plan one before realizing that, as Munroe writes, "you can't shake the feeling that you're missing something." What you're missing is a sine qua non: a pool. So you decide whether to build an in-ground pool or an aboveground pool, et voilproblem solved. But how to get water into it? You can use a giant industrial shredder to grind up huge piles of plastic water bottles, squeezing out enough to fill the pool in a couple of hours but also generating a mountain of plastic waste. You can siphon it from an uphill neighbor's pool using Archimedean principles. You can extract water from the air, as Matt Damon did in The Martian, maybe blowing yourself up in the process. And so forth. Munroe turns to a battery of juicy problems, some beyond improbable. How to jump really high? You can find a very tall mountain, maybe one that's "upwind from where the Olympics are being held," and catch a thermal updraft with a sailplane rig. How to make a friend? Use the principle of physics called the "mean free path," which will instruct you that "if you want to physically run into people, you'll have better luck in a packed football stadium than in the boreal forests of Canada." Of course, a physical collision may earn you an enemy, or someone who avoids you, at any rate. Munroe's madness has its method: His solutions tend to the daft and are definitely outside the box, but figuring out for yourself how to get something done, whether changing a light bulb or powering a house, "can be fun and informative and sometimes leads you to surprising places."An enjoyable treat for fans of logic puzzles, brain hacking, kaizen, mad science, and other forms of mental stimulation. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

How to Catch a Drone A wedding-photography drone is buzzing around above you. You don't know what it's doing there and you want it to stop. Let's suppose you have a garage full of sports equipment-- baseballs, tennis rackets, lawn darts, you name it. Which sport's projectiles would work best for hitting a drone? And who would make the best anti-drone guard? A baseball pitcher? A basketball player? A tennis player? A golfer? Someone else? There are a few factors to consider -- accuracy, weight, range, and projectile size. One sport I couldn't find good data on was tennis. I found some studies of tennis pro accuracy, but they involved hitting targets marked on the court, rather than in the air. So I reached out to Serena Williams. To my pleasant surprise, she was happy to help out. Her husband, Alexis, offered a sacrificial drone, a DJI Mavic Pro 2 with a broken camera. They headed out to her practice court to see how effective the world's best tennis player would be at fending off a robot invasion. The few studies I could find suggested tennis players would score relatively low com- pared to athletes who threw projectiles-- more like kickers than pitchers. My tentative guess was that a champion player would have an accuracy ratio around 50 when serving, and take 5-7 tries to hit a drone from 40 feet. (Would a tennis ball even knock down a drone? Maybe it would just ricochet off and cause the drone to wobble! I had so many questions.) Alexis flew the drone over the net and hovered there, while Serena served from the baseline. Her first serve went low. The second zipped past the drone to one side. The third serve scored a direct hit on one of the propellers. The drone spun, momentarily seemed like it might stay in the air, then flipped over and smashed into the court. Serena started laughing as Alexis walked over to investigate the crash site, where the drone lay on the court near several propeller fragments. I had expected a tennis pro would be able to hit the drone in five to seven tries; she got it in three. Excerpted from How To: Absurd Scientific Advice for Common Real-World Problems by Randall Munroe All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.