Click on a thumbnail to go to Google Books.
Loading... How To: Absurd Scientific Advice for Common Real-World Problems (edition 2019)by Randall Munroe (Author)
Work InformationHow To: Absurd Scientific Advice for Common Real-World Problems by Randall Munroe
Loading...
Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. Incredibly interesting, but not always attention-grabbing (hence the fact that it took over two months for me to finish). Many of the chapters in this book were great, but there were a few that would be best described as meh. ( ) Fun thought experiments using math and physics to analyze out-of-the-box (and often impractical) solutions to everyday problems, with lots of fun xkcd illustrations. I especially liked some of the guest interviews where he asked an astronaut how to land an airplane under increasingly improbable situations, and how he got a pro tennis player to test whether a drone could be shot down by a tennis ball. I didn't love this book for the same reason that I think a lot of people will specifically love this book - there's a lot more maths, science and physics, a lot more equations, and a lot less of Munroe's humour about life, the universe and everything. Honestly, that makes it a plus for a certain kind of crowd, and if you're one of that crowd and you're reading this review, I hope you loved the book. no reviews | add a review
DistinctionsNotable Lists
Essays.
Science.
Nonfiction.
Humor (Nonfiction.)
HTML:The world's most entertaining and useless self-help guide, from the brilliant mind behind the wildly popular webcomic xkcd and the #1 New York Times bestsellers 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. 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 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. No library descriptions found. |
Current DiscussionsNonePopular covers
Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)502Natural sciences and mathematics General Science MiscellanyLC ClassificationRatingAverage:
Is this you?Become a LibraryThing Author. |