Рэндалл Манро – лучшие книги

Хорошая шутка становится еще лучше, если вы шутите с абсолютно серьезным лицом. Рэндалл Манро шутит очень серьезно — на самые нелепые вопросы он отвечает, вооружившись сверхмощными научными инструментами. Суперсовременные компьютерные симуляторы, оборонная статистика (еще недавно строго засекреченная), консультации ведущих специалистов в разных областях науки — все…

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.

Для любой задачи всегда есть несколько путей решения: правильный, неправильный и чудовищно плохой, который никто и никогда не попробует. Эта книга — руководство для поклонников третьего варианта.
Изучая самые абсурдные пределы возможного, Рэндалл Манро дает непрактичные советы обо всем на свете, помогая лучше понять науку и технологии, окружающие нас в повседневной жизни.
Вы наконец-то узнаете:
— Как сделать селфи с Венерой
— Как пересечь реку, вскипятив ее
— Как не опоздать на встречу, изменив ход времени
И самое главное…
— Как избавиться от этой книги!

Looking for something great to read? Browse our editors' picks for 2015's Best Books of the Year in fiction, nonfiction, mysteries, children's books, and much more.

Randall Munroe describes xkcd as a webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language. While it's practically required reading in the geek community, xkcd fans are as varied as the comic's subject matter. This book creates laughs from science jokes on one page to relationship humor on another. "Хkcd: Volume 0" is the first book from the immensely popular webcomic with a passionate readership (just Google xkcd meetup). The artist selected personal and fan favorites from his first 600 comics. It was lovingly assembled from high-resolution original scans of the comics (the mouseover text is discreetly included), and features a lot of doodles, notes, and puzzles in the margins. The book is published by Breadpig, which donates all of the publisher profits from this book to Room to Read for promoting literacy in the developing world.

What If you still had so many more strange questions about the universe?
And What If Randall Munroe, former NASA roboticist and xkcd creator, were prepared to move mountains, fill the solar system with soup and alter the space-time continuum to answer them?
Whether it's how to make a lava lamp out of lava or feeding the inhabitants of New York to a T. Rex, welcome to the weird, wonderful (and sometimes terrifying) world of What If? 2