How To by Randall Munroe

 Source of book: My kid owns this.

 

How To: Absurd Scientific Advice for Common Real-World Problems is a lot like it sounds like. Similar to Munroe’s other book, What If? Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions, this one is lighthearted and rather on the bizarre side of things. 

 

Randall Munroe is the creator of the XKCD webcomic. (In case you wondered, no, it doesn’t stand for anything.) The comic covers a pretty broad range of nerdiness, probably due to Munroe’s background at NASA. Anyway, it is pretty fun to check out from time to time.

 

This book takes a look at ordinary things one might want to do, and explains how to do them in the most absurd way possible. Or, as the book begins:

 

Hello!

This is a book of bad ideas. 

At least, most of them are bad ideas. It’s possible some good ones slipped through the cracks. If so, I apologize. 

 

So, just to use the first one, “How to Jump Really High,” it goes from a rather good explanation of how things like high jumping and pole vaulting work to, “if I wear a glider suit and catch a thermal over a mountain, how high could I theoretically jump?” 

 

Throughout, the book is illustrated by Munroe’s XKCD style cartoons. Such as this one:

 

Trying to talk about this book is a little bit like explaining jokes, but I did want to mention a few highlights. 

 

For example, in the chapter on “How to Move,” Munroe goes from explaining how to move your possessions to “why not move the whole house?” In that chapter, he notes that the US military actually studied how to attach multiple helicopters together for greater lifting power. He also notes that the diagrams look somewhat like mating dragonflies. And then suggests that the project should have gone by the name of “Helicentipede.” 

 

I will also give Munroe major points for his knowledge (or at least research) of legal issues. In the question of what to do if a fault line moves your house, he notes the Cullen Earthquake Act here in California, which permits property owners to petition the court to re-draw property boundaries if an earthquake moves lines awkwardly. (And, they do. See my post on Point Reyes.) 

 

In the chapter on building a lava moat around your house - as the author said, bad ideas - but if you are a supervillain - Munroe tackles the problem of how to keep the house cool. Lava radiates a lot of heat, and, well, you don’t want to fry. The problem is that the best way to do so is...ventilation. 

 

[F]rom a supervillain point of view, perhaps you should be even more worried about the network of air ducts beneath your house. Because if there is one thing we’ve all learned from action movies….

 

...it’s that someone always ends up sneaking through the ventilation shafts. 

 

Moving on to the chapter entitled “How to Throw Things,” there is a link to XKCD’s bizarre calculator. I think he missed an opportunity to entitle it the “Yeet Machine,” but whatever. It is fun to play with. 

 

The chapter on “How to Play Football” is pretty hilarious. And a not-bad explanation of the basic theory behind “goal” based sports. It also has this cartoon:

 

“How to Ski” is, naturally, about friction coefficients. Because, well, this is Randall Munroe. My favorite line is a terrible pun. Munroe looks at the coefficients and how to calculate minimum slope for this. And goes to the extreme, of course. 

 

If the skis are made of rubber, and the surface is cement, you’ll need quite a steep slope to ski, which is presumably why rubber-on-cement skiing is so unpopular. (Footnote: Ironically, it’s never really gained traction.) 

 

In a few instances, Munroe consults scientists in various fields to answer the more difficult questions. In the “How to Power Your House” chapter, he ends up consulting “astrophysicist and end-of-the-universe expert” Dr. Katie Mack. 

 

I asked Dr. Mack how much power would be released if someone triggered vacuum decay in their yard, and whether it could be harnessed to power their home. Her response: “Please do not do that.” 

 

Munroe shares a lot of common cultural touchstones with me and others of my generation and younger. I noted LOTR above, but I also appreciated a Terry Pratchett quote. The chapter on “How to Make Friends” quotes Kant, followed by Granny Weatherwax, on a succinct summary of ethics. 

 

A young man tried to tell Granny that the nature of sin was a complicated thing. She said that, no, it was very simple. “Sin,” she said, “is when you treat people as things.”

 

That’s pretty hard to beat, actually. And, if white Evangelicals (well, all of us too) actually started living that way, there would be, as Rachel Lynde said, “we would soon see a blessed change.”

 

“How to Take a Selfie” is an outstanding chapter for many reasons, not least of which is the detailed and accurate layman’s explanation of how vision and photography work. For example, how do photographers get those “giant moon with a structure silhouetted against it” shots? (Answer: lots of distance and a giant telephoto lens) It also has a great list of wild claims about astronomical events. Which is a pet peeve of mine. Seriously, people, why do you share this tripe? It’s easy to fact check!

 

The final bit I want to mention is the chapter on how to win an election. 

 

Winning elections is hard. The truth is, people are complicated, there are a lot of them, and no one is ever 100 percent sure why they do what they do or what they’re going to do next. 

 

But if your goal is simply to win an election, then as a general rule you should be for things that voters like and against things they dislike. 

 

That’s kind of obvious in a way. But we have just lived through 30 years of the Republican Party refusing to stand for things that voters actually like, instead, relying on voter suppression, gerrymandering, and the electoral college to win without actually supporting popular policies. Just saying.  

 

The chapter goes on to list a couple pages of things that 95% or greater of people support. (The polls behind them are in the endnotes.) It’s pretty funny. Particularly the comic at the end where the politician supports the opposite of the voters he needs to attract. 

 

Anyway, the book is a lot of fun. It’s a nice change of pace from the more serious stuff I am reading right now - hey, the serious books are good too, but I need a variety. Munroe knows his science, and is hilarious in the way he takes it to the extremes.