How To
Absurd Scientific Advice for Common Real-World Problems
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Narrated by:
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Wil Wheaton
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Written by:
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Randall Munroe
About this listen
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 AudioYou may also enjoy...
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Terry Pratchett: BBC Radio Drama Collection
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Somewhere on the frontier between thought and reality exists the Discworld, a parallel time and place which might sound and smell very much like our own, but which looks completely different. Collected together for the first time are seven full-cast BBC Radio dramatisations of Terry Pratchett’s novels, with star-studded casts including Martin Jarvis, Sheila Hancock, Anton Lesser, Philip Jackson, Alex Jennings and Mark Heap.
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delightful
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Performance
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This was great!!!!
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Great book, TERRIBLE audio editing
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Adam Savage is a maker. From Chewbacca’s bandolier to a 1,000-shot Nerf gun, he has built thousands of spectacular projects as a special-effects artist and the cohost of MythBusters. Adam is also an educator, passionate about instilling the principles of making in the next generation of inventors and inspiring them to turn their curiosity into creation. In this practical and passionate guide, Adam weaves together vivid personal stories, original sketches and photographs from some of his most memorable projects, and interviews with many of his iconic and visionary friends.
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A valuable tool in and of itself;
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- Original Recording
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Through the ages of Britain, from the 15th century to the 21st, Edmund Blackadder has meddled his way along the bloodlines, aided by his servant and sidekick, Baldrick, and hindered by an assortment of dimwitted aristocrats. Now the complete history of Blackadder is collected together, including the four TV series: The Black Adder, Blackadder II, Blackadder the Third and Blackadder Goes Forth.
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It’s Blackadder. What more can I say !
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Little Fuzzy [Audible]
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- Narrated by: Peter Ganim
- Length: 6 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
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The chartered Zarathustra Company had it all their way. Their charter was for a Class III uninhabited planet, which Zarathustra was, and it meant they owned the planet lock stock and barrel. They exploited it, developed it and reaped the huge profits from it without interference from the Colonial Government. Then Jack Holloway, a sunstone prospector, appeared on the scene with his family of Fuzzies and the passionate conviction that they were not cute animals but little people.
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A good performance of a long time favorite.
- By Bob Patey on 2021-09-28
Written by: H. Beam Piper
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
Average Customer RatingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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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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- Home
- 2020-02-22
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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- Sean Chisholm
- 2020-09-22
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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- Jessica Antonichuk
- 2023-01-12
Funny science
A quirky science book that will make you laugh and think all at once. Love this authors work.
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- Sarah Fitz
- 2019-09-05
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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- Mike Reiter
- 2020-05-06
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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- 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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