How To: Absurd Scientific Advice for Common Real-World Problems from Randall Munroe of xkcd

(Paperback)

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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

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

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.

'How strange science can fix everyday problems' New Scientist

'A brilliant book: clamber in for a wild ride' Nature

Reviews

Munroe is the perfect guy to take on a project like this... a wonderful guide for curious minds - BILL GATES

Ridiculous, delightful and, damn it, educational - Sunday Times (Culture)

A pure delight, a salty-sweet mixture of hard science and bonkers whimsy - Boing Boing

Extremely accurate and often amusing answers to everyday issues - Daily Mail

Consistently fascinating and entertaining - Wall Street Journal

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

[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

Author Bio

Randall Munroe is the creator of the webcomic xkcd and bestselling author of What If, Thing Explainer and xkcd: Volume 0. Randall was born in Easton, Pennsylvania, and grew up outside Richmond, Virginia. After studying physics at Christopher Newport University, he got a job building robots at NASA Langley Research Center. In 2006 he left NASA to draw comics on the internet full time, and has since been nominated for a Hugo Award three times. The International Astronomical Union recently named an asteroid after him: asteroid 4942 Munroe is big enough to cause mass extinction if it ever hits a planet like Earth.