How To

For any task you might want to do, there’s a right way, a wrong way and a way so baroquely 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.

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 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 powering your house by destroying the fabric of space-time. And if you want to get rid of this book when you are done with it, he walks you through your options for proper disposal, including dissolving it in the ocean, converting it to a vapour, 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 you. As he did so brilliantly in What If?, he invites us to explore the most absurd reaches of the possible. Full of infographics and illustrations, How To is a delightfully mind-bending way to better understand the science and technology underlying the things we do every day.