Description

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

Randall Munroe is . . .

‘Nerd royalty’ Ben Goldacre

‘Totally brilliant’ Tim Harford

‘Laugh-out-loud funny’ Bill Gates

‘Wonderful’ Neil Gaiman

AN INSTANT #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

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. Full of clever infographics and amusing illustrations, How To is a delightfully mind-bending way to better understand the science and technology underlying the things we do every day.

Publisher Review

An enjoyable treat for fans of logic puzzles, brain hacking, kaizen, mad science, and other forms of mental stimulation * KIRKUS REVIEWS * A gleefully nerdy hypothetical instruction book for armchair scientists of all ages * BOOKLIST * 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 * How To tackles problems from the mundane-such as how to move to a new house-to those that may trouble a mad scientist building her first lava moat. The solutions are often hilariously, and purposefully, absurd. Embedded in these solutions, however, is solid scientific, engineering, and experimental understanding . . . [for] anyone who appreciates science-based solutions to life’s problems. * SCIENCE * The creator of the popular, extremely excellent webcomic xkcd cleverly illustrates a guide of complicated solutions to simple tasks as common as digging a hole. * USA TODAY * Consistently fascinating and entertaining * WALL STREET JOURNAL * Extremely accurate and amusing answers to everyday issues * DAILY MAIL * A pure delight, a salty-sweet mixture of hard science and bonkers whimsy. * BOING BOING * Fascinating * Guardian * A great deal of fun * The Economist * Required reading across the world * New York Times * Praise for Randall Munroe: * . * An enjoyable treat for fans of logic puzzles, brain hacking, kaizen, mad science, and other forms of mental stimulation * Kirkus Reviews * A gleefully nerdy hypothetical instruction book for armchair scientists of all ages * Booklist * 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 * [How To] tackles problems from the mundane-such as how to move to a new house-to those that may trouble a mad scientist building her first lava moat. The solutions are often hilariously, and purposefully, absurd. Embedded in these solutions, however, is solid scientific, engineering, and experimental understanding . . . [for] anyone who appreciates science-based solutions to life’s problems * Science Magazine * The creator of the popular, extremely excellent webcomic xkcd cleverly illustrates a guide of complicated solutions to simple tasks as common as digging a hole * USA Today * Consistently fascinating and entertaining * Wall Street Journal * Extremely accurate and often amusing answers to everyday issues * Daily Mail * A pure delight, a salty-sweet mixture of hard science and bonkers whimsy * Boing Boing *