How To
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.
Stats for nerds
4recommend
4mentions
4people
2017–2022years
100% recommend
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- I'm glad to hear there's a follow up book to What If? (How To was also good, of course) – it's one of the more entertaining, yet educational, audiobooks I've listened to (and it really does work well in audio form unlike much non-fiction, plus Wil Wheaton is the narrator).
- That's fantastic. Didn't know that he has a new book, for the lazy ones, called "How To: Absurd Scientific Advice for Common Real-World Problems" [0]. Also pre-ordered!
[0] https://www.amazon.com/How-Absurd-Scientific-Real-World-Prob...
- It's one of the greatest books I've ever read in general and it's one of those I'd recommend to anyone. Especially parents.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/769016.How_to_Talk_So_Ki...
- Best thing for getting stuff into your head: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1250623.How_to_Develop_a... Much like weight lifting, following this book will give you specific memorisation techniques which can be useful, but also results in a general strengthening of memory, even when you don't use any of the exact techniques). It also strengthens your ability to imagine things, and hold those images or arrangements in your head, which is useful for applying mental models you've learnt.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9793361-the-decision-boo... Not the best, and I only really use the first one in the book (Eisenhower Matrix), but I found that alone to be worth the price (you could just google that one though). The rest of it is useful as examples of the wide variety of model types and types of things that can be modelled.
Thinking in Systems: A Primer, is a great book that I highly recommend. It's one of those books that serves as a great introduction to the subject of creating models of systems, and it's neither too long, nor overly specific on any particular subject. By the end of it, you'll know roughly enough to be able to know what you want to know next, in regards to system models. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3828902-thinking-in-syst...
This blog post is more like a reference resource, and I think it's worth looking over and picking out whatever interests you: https://medium.com/@yegg/mental-models-i-find-repeatedly-use...
EDIT: because my formatting was atrocious.
