How To: Absurd Scientific Advice for Common Real-World Problems
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Description
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.
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 listeners. As he did so brilliantly in What If?, Munroe 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.
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.
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 listeners. As he did so brilliantly in What If?, Munroe 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.
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Format:
OverDrive MP3 Audiobook, OverDrive Listen
Edition:
Unabridged
Street Date:
09/03/2019
Language:
English
ISBN:
9780525635697
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Citations
APA Citation (style guide)
Randall Munroe. (2019). How To: Absurd Scientific Advice for Common Real-World Problems. Unabridged Books on Tape.
Chicago / Turabian - Author Date Citation (style guide)Randall Munroe. 2019. How To: Absurd Scientific Advice for Common Real-World Problems. Books on Tape.
Chicago / Turabian - Humanities Citation (style guide)Randall Munroe, How To: Absurd Scientific Advice for Common Real-World Problems. Books on Tape, 2019.
MLA Citation (style guide)Randall Munroe. How To: Absurd Scientific Advice for Common Real-World Problems. Unabridged Books on Tape, 2019.
Note! Citation formats are based on standards as of July 2022. Citations contain only title, author, edition, publisher, and year published. Citations should be used as a guideline and should be double checked for accuracy.
Copy Details
| Library | Owned | Available |
|---|---|---|
| Shared Digital Collection | 4 | 0 |
There is 1 hold on this title.
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Grouped Work ID:
9179b296-49a5-36bc-58c6-28ed20dd09a7
Needs Update?:
No
Date Added:
Aug 29, 2019 15:02:28
Date Updated:
Oct 24, 2021 06:14:41
Last Metadata Check:
Apr 21, 2024 13:20:17
Last Metadata Change:
Feb 08, 2024 18:11:25
Last Availability Check:
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Last Availability Change:
Apr 21, 2024 13:20:20
Last Grouped Work Modification Time:
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- 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.
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 listeners. As he did so brilliantly in What If?, Munroe 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. - reviews
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Starred review from June 17, 2019
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.
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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.
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... - sortTitle
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