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  • How To

  • Absurd Scientific Advice for Common Real-World Problems
  • Written by: Randall Munroe
  • Narrated by: Wil Wheaton
  • Length: 6 hrs and 15 mins
  • 4.4 out of 5 stars (87 ratings)

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How To cover art

How To

Written by: Randall Munroe
Narrated by: Wil Wheaton
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Publisher's Summary

The world's most entertaining and useless self-help guide, from the brilliant mind behind the wildly popular webcomic xkcd and the number one New York Times best sellers 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. 

Best-selling 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 '90s 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 a 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.

©2019 Randall Munroe (P)2019 Penguin Audio

What the critics say

“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)

“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.... 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.” (Library Journal)

“The mind behind the webcomic xkcd provides a slew of hilariously overcomplicated instructions for everything from throwing a pool party to winning an election, bringing his signature stick figures - and his singular wit - along for the ride. How To is a loving testament to the power of the human brain to take things to absurd lengths.” (Glen Weldon, NPR)

What listeners say about How To

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  • NK
  • 2023-03-07

Dumb

The premises and solutions are for the most part dumb. The content is definitely not as clever or funny as the author thinks it is. Some of the science is mildly interesting but it's wrapped in too much nonsense. Maybe it's aimed at children?

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    4 out of 5 stars
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    4 out of 5 stars

Funny science

A quirky science book that will make you laugh and think all at once. Love this authors work.

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Really like this book

Fun listen and great writer. Wil Wheaton is a good audio book voice. Highly suggest to read this book.

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    3 out of 5 stars
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    2 out of 5 stars

Ok, not a fun as the first

This book is very much like the first book by Randall Munroe (What If? Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions) but less fun. Several scenarios are postulated, like moving house. Absurd or unconventional solutions are proposed. In this way it us much like the first. Although this feels much lazier. The first book did the math. This book does some of the math but only for the most impractical solutions.

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  • J
  • 2020-04-26

Hilarious

I really enjoyed this book, especially the guest appearances of Commander Chris Hadfield and Serena Williams (as interviewees, not narrators). The pacing is fairly quick, and it is easy to breeze through chapters. Wil Wheaton was fantastic as the narrator. Comparing the audiobook to the physical version I can tell you that Wheaton reads the footnotes and sometimes reads the text of the cartoons, however, the only way to enjoy all the cartoons included in the book is to read the physical copy. However, it’s still hilarious as an audiobook.

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randall monroe for the win, again!

Another great book filled with humour and scientific curiosity inspiring ideas. A pleasure to read/listen to.

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Nowhere near as good as What If....

Not as interesting, not as funny, not as informative..... I kinda felt sorry for Wil, trying sooooo hard with sooooo little......

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