AN INSTANT #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER "How To will make you laugh as you learn…With How To
you can't help but appreciate the glorious complexity of our universe and the amazing breadth
of humanity's effort to comprehend it. If you want some lightweight edification you won't go
wrong with How To." -CNET "[How To] has science and jokes in it so 10 10 can recommend."
-Simone Giertz The world's most entertaining and useless self-help guide a fun-for-all
holiday gift from the brilliant mind behind the wildly popular webcomic xkcd and the
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 readers. As he did so brilliantly in What If? Munroe invites us
to explore the most absurd reaches of the possible. Full of clever infographics and fun
illustrations How To is a delightfully mind-bending way to better understand the science and
technology underlying the things we do every day.
