Popular Science
By: Randall Munroe(Author)
320 pages, b/w illustrations
"How To" sees xkcd webcomic creator Randall Munroe propose patently absurd but funny solutions to real-world problems in a book that is liberally illustrated with his trademark stick figures.
![How To]( "How To")
Click to have a closer look
About this book
Customer reviews
Related titles
About this book
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 How To 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. 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.
Customer Reviews
Popular Science
By: Randall Munroe(Author)
320 pages, b/w illustrations
"How To" sees xkcd webcomic creator Randall Munroe propose patently absurd but funny solutions to real-world problems in a book that is liberally illustrated with his trademark stick figures.
"An enjoyable treat for fans of logic puzzles, brain hacking, kaizen, mad science, and other forms of mental stimulation"
– Kirkus Reviews
"Consistently fascinating and entertaining"
– Wall Street Journal
"Required reading across the world"
– New York Times
"A great deal of fun"
– The Economist
"Fascinating"
– Guardian
"Extremely accurate and often amusing answers to everyday issues"
– Daily Mail
"A pure delight, a salty-sweet mixture of hard science and bonkers whimsy."
– BOING BOING
"Extremely accurate and amusing answers to everyday issues"
– Daily Mail
"Consistently fascinating and entertaining"
– Wall Street Journal
"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."
– USA Today
"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."
– Science
"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
"A gleefully nerdy hypothetical instruction book for armchair scientists of all ages"
– Booklist
"An enjoyable treat for fans of logic puzzles, brain hacking, kaizen, mad science, and other forms of mental stimulation"
– Kirkus Reviews
