The world’s most entertaining and useless self-help guide, in the brilliant mind behind the wildly popular webcomic xkcd and the #1 New York Times bestsellers IMAGINE IF? and Thing Explainer

For any task you might want to do, there’s a right way, a wrong way, and a means so monumentally complex, excessive, and inadvisable that nobody would ever try it. How To is definitely a guide to the third kind of strategy. It’s filled with highly impractical suggestions for everything from about how exactly To: Absurd Scientific Assistance for Common Real-World Problems landing a airplane to digging a hole.

Bestselling author and cartoonist Randall Munroe points out how to predict the weather by analyzing the pixels of your Facebook photos. He teaches you how to tell if you’re an infant boomer or a 90’s kid by calculating the radioactivity of your teeth. He gives tips for taking a selfie having a telescope, crossing a river by boiling it, and powering your home by destroying the fabric of space-time. And if you wish to eliminate book once you’re done with it, he strolls you through your alternatives for proper disposal, including dissolving it in the ocean, switching it to a vapor, using tectonic plates to subduct it in to the Earth’s mantle, or introducing it into the Sun.

By exploring one of the most complicated ways to do simple duties, Munroe doesn’t just make things difficult for himself and his listeners. As he do so brilliantly in What If?, Munroe invites us to explore the most absurd gets to of the feasible. How To is certainly a delightfully mind-bending method to better understand the technology and technology root the things we do every day.