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

by Randall Munroe

Wil Wheaton (Narrator)

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

• ISBN10: 1473680360
• ISBN13: 9781473680364
• Publish Date: 3 September 2019
• Publish Status: Active
• Publish Country: GB
• Publisher: John Murray Press
• Imprint: John Murray Publishers Ltd
• Edition: Unabridged edition
• Format: Audiobook (MP3)
• Duration: 6 hours and 16 minutes
• Language: English

Reviews

[remo]

Otro maravilloso libro de Randall Munroe tras su What if?, que tanto nos gustó por aquí. El autor se saca de la manga 28 situaciones en las que hay que hacer algo: hacer una fiesta en la piscina (implica construir la piscina), cruzar un río, tocar el piano, jugar al fútbol, esquiar, jugar al tú la llevas, enviar un archivo, cargar el móvil, así hasta 28 cosas, y empieza a divagar sobre maneras más y más esotéricas (pero siempre respaldadas por datos y ciencia) de hacerlo. Pero cuando digo divagar digo DIVAGAR.
El autor salpimenta el texto con un montón de dibujos "malos", algunos de los cuales son realmente buenos. Muy recomendable.

[jamiereadthis]

Absurdly fun just like Randall Monroe always is.