How To
Books | Humor / Form / Trivia
4
(237)
Randall Munroe
AN INSTANT #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER “How To will make you laugh as you learn…With How To, you can't help but appreciate the glorious complexity of our universe and the amazing breadth of humanity's effort to comprehend it. If you want some lightweight edification, you won't go wrong with How To.” —CNET “[How To] has science and jokes in it, so 10/10 can recommend.” —Simone Giertz The world's most entertaining and useless self-help guide from the brilliant mind behind the wildly popular webcomic xkcd, the bestsellers What If? and Thing Explainer, and What If? 2, coming September 13, 2022For 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 readers. As he did so brilliantly in What If?, Munroe invites us to explore the most absurd reaches of the possible. Full of clever infographics and fun illustrations, 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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More Details:
Author
Randall Munroe
Pages
320
Publisher
Penguin
Published Date
2019-09-03
ISBN
0525537090 9780525537090
Ratings
Google: 5
Community ReviewsSee all
"A good collection of poetry of what it is like as a girl growing up. A little too sad for my taste, though."
Ricki Marking-Camuto
"Working my way through all the books in our apartment! Found this one which our friend Matt bought for my husband awhile back. Was an interesting read although a bit math heavy for me. Very informative and funny though, and enjoyed the comics throughout. Work a read if you are a fan of xkcd."
Victoria Dears
"I haven’t finished reading it but I decided it was so good I had to make sure I wrote down that it was good. It’s that great. They just suggested to ride a horse onto a football field because nothing in the rules says you CANT bring a horse to a football game."
Rhiannon
"Generally, this is a fun book, with an engaging mix of real science facts and absurdity. There are a few times that the science facts weigh things down a little too much and the book bogs down a little, but those times are few and far between."
John Detrick
"I didn't finish it. There was some interesting things in here but basically I didn't get into it and found it a bit obvious in most places. <br/><br/>I did learn that the polar ice caps are so big that they have gravity. This causes seawater to be pulled to the poles and if the ice caps melt then this water will flow away from the poles. This will amplify the flooding caused by the ice cap melt."
John Woakes