Book Review
How To
Absurd Scientific Advice for Common Real-World ProblemsWritten by: Randall Munroe
Narrated by: Wil Wheaton
Genres: Science | True Life | Self-Help
Published: 3rd of September, 2019
Length: 6 Hours 15 Minutes
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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.
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.
Best-selling author and cartoonist Randall Munroe explains how to predict the weather by analysing 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.
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?, he 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.
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| Reviewed: 2020-07-30 | |
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Hilarious and Totally Useless Advice
Okay, so this book was a LOT of fun. Randall Munroe, the mind behind the webcomic "xkcd". In this book, Munroe crunches the hard numbers and comes up with absurd solutions to common problems.Need to cross a river but have no boat? Try boiling it to steam so you can just walk! Oh, but by the way... here's what will happen if you do THAT.
And so on with a bunch of other seemingly normal situations that quickly devolve into nightmares for physicists are large governments alike.
Narrated by the wonderful Wil Wheaton - seriously, is this guy just the most likeable guy on the planet?? - he kept me listening and laughing all the way through. Wheaton does a great job, nailing inflections and dramatising the reading of admittedly stodgy equations and formulas.
This, I guess would be my only (if minor) criticism. Obviously, it'd be easier to take in a long formula in written format. When read aloud it's harder to follow, but this is just minor.
I mean, it's not like I'm going to follow any of the advice in the book.
Honest.
Please don't call the feds!
Solid investment for your time and health of your funny bone.
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