How To

Ridiculous, delightful and, damn it, educational * Sunday Times (Culture) * A pure delight, a salty-sweet mixture of hard science and bonkers whimsy * Boing Boing * Extremely accurate and often amusing answers to everyday issues * Daily Mail * Consistently fascinating and entertaining * Wall Street Journal * The creator of the popular, extremely excellent webcomic xkcd cleverly illustrates a guide of complicated solutions to simple tasks as common as digging a hole * USA Today * [How To] tackles problems from the mundane-such as how to move to a new house-to those that may trouble a mad scientist building her first lava moat. The solutions are often hilariously, and purposefully, absurd. Embedded in these solutions, however, is solid scientific, engineering, and experimental understanding . . . [for] anyone who appreciates science-based solutions to life's problems * Science Magazine * A witty, educational examination of 'unusual approaches to common tasks' . . . generously laced with dry humor . . . Munroe's comic stick-figure art is an added bonus. . . . Apart from generating laughter, the book also manages to achieve his serious objective: to get his audience thinking * Publishers Weekly, starred review * A gleefully nerdy hypothetical instruction book for armchair scientists of all ages * Booklist * An enjoyable treat for fans of logic puzzles, brain hacking, kaizen, mad science, and other forms of mental stimulation * Kirkus Reviews * Required reading across the world * New York Times * A great deal of fun * The Economist * Fascinating * Guardian *

Randall Munroe is the creator of the webcomic xkcd and bestselling author of What If?, Thing Explainer and xkcd: Volume 0. Randall was born in Easton, Pennsylvania, and grew up outside Richmond, Virginia. After studying physics at Christopher Newport University, he got a job building robots at NASA Langley Research Center. In 2006 he left NASA to draw comics on the internet full time, and has since been nominated for a Hugo Award three times. The International Astronomical Union recently named an asteroid after him: asteroid 4942 Munroe is big enough to cause mass extinction if it ever hits a planet like Earth.