In How To: XKCD author offers absurd advice for ordinary tasks

Talking about Saturn Vs at on stage at a NASA facility is always appropriate-here's XKCD creator Randall Munroe doing just that in 2015. (credit: Lee Hutchinson)

Any time physicists gets together, one of them will tell a very old joke about a farmer who wants to make their farm more efficient. In the joke, a list of inappropriate professionals offer the farmer reasonable suggestions. The punchline comes from the physicist who responds "Well, let's assume that cows are spheres... "

How To was released in early September. (credit: Riverhead Books)

The actual punchline isn't in the joke itself-it's what happens next: one of the physicists listening to the joke will lecture the rest on how the approximation isn't that bad really. They will end with a list of all the things you can learn about the world from spherical cows. The joke only ends when the bar closes. Physicists: ruining jokes, cows, farming, and most of biology since 1687.

Randall Munroe's new book, How To, is the spherical cows joke relentlessly replicated and explained without-and this is the important part-removing the humor. Munroe has, as the subtitle Absurd Advice for Real-World Problems explains, produced a book of absurd scientific advice. It is, essentially, a "how you shouldn't" manual. With that in mind, you should not read How To as you would an ordinary book.

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