SKU: 30214879303

How to: Absurd Scientific Advice for Common Real-World Problems

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How to: Absurd Scientific Advice for Common Real-World ProblemsAN INSTANT #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER "How To will make you laugh as you learn With How To, you can't help but appreciate the glorious complexity of our universe and the amazing breadth of humanity's effort to comprehend it. If you want some lightweight edification, you won't go wrong with How To." CNET " How To] has science and jokes in it, so 10 10 can recommend." Simone Giertz The world's most entertaining and useless self help guide from the

AN INSTANT #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

"How To will make you laugh as you learn...With How To, you can't help but appreciate the glorious complexity of our universe and the amazing breadth of humanity's effort to comprehend it. If you want some lightweight edification, you won't go wrong with How To." --CNET

" How To] has science and jokes in it, so 10/10 can recommend." --Simone Giertz

The world's most entertaining and useless self-help guide from the brilliant mind behind the wildly popular webcomic xkcd and the bestsellers What If? and Thing Explainer

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.

Binding Type: Hardcover
Publisher: Riverhead Books
Published: 09/03/2019
ISBN: 9780525537090
Pages: 320
Weight: 1.63lbs
Size: 9.10h x 7.00w x 1.20d

Review Citations: Publishers Weekly 06/17/2019
Kirkus Reviews 07/01/2019
Library Journal 08/01/2019 pg. 118
Booklist 08/01/2019 pg. 10
Shelf Awareness 09/20/2019
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SKU: 30214879303

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4.4 ★★★★★
Based on 273 reviews
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B
Verified Purchase
Ben
Birmingham, US
★★★★★ 5
Easy to use Plug and Play
Size: USB C to Ethernet Adapter
The item works great. I was having issues with video conference calls even with strong wifi in my house. I bought this adapter due to my HP laptop not having an Ethernet port. This worked great right out of the box. It was detected automatically and as soon as I plugged the Ethernet cable into the adapter, my laptop immediately switched over to that and my internet became more stable.
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Reviewed in the United States on May 8, 2026
B
Verified Purchase
Brandon Huber
New York, US
★★★★★ 4
It's functional but not as fast as I expected.
Size: USB C to Ethernet Adapter
For Android phone Samsung Flagship Galaxy Series phones... at best getting 136 Mbps, which is 0.136 Gbps. But it is working and allowing me to transfer files within my network. No where near a Gigabit transfer. I will likely keep it because I have another use case for it (a faulty Ethernet on a laptop) and don't get me started with the abyssal wifi speeds on laptops. This deserves at best 4 stars.
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Reviewed in the United States on May 24, 2026
M
Verified Purchase
Maria Cross
West Palm Beach, US
★★★★★ 5
Great item
Size: USB C to Ethernet Adapter
Works like a charm. Easy set up.
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Reviewed in the United States on May 21, 2026
B
Verified Purchase
Bimmer369
Phoenix, US
★★★★★ 5
Solid; long lasting
I use this adaptor to hard wire an ethernet internet connection straight into a Samsung Galaxy S10+ with PD (charges phone while connected). I also use an S8+ which works, too. This is a great option for those of us who understand the dangers of being exposed to low-powered microwaves all day and night (AKA Wi-Fi). While hard wired to ethernet, you can enjoy the internet with airplane mode on, which is a big plus! I've used several different branded adaptors (the ones without PD kill your device's battery QUICKLY) for this purpose, and this Anker outshines them all. Most other brands (I've tried Belkin, Ugreen, and some other somewhat obscure brands) work fine for a short time and then begin to get spotty, losing and regaining connection intermittently until crashing and not working at all over a short period of time, usually not longer than 3 to 4 months if you're real lucky. However, I've had this Anker for nearly a year (10 months and change), and it's still going strong. Now, it's not perfect. It does lose connection from time to time and then regain connection just like the others, but nowhere near as frequent, and if you are mindful of the orientation of the cords and take care not to twist or put torque on them once they're connected to a device, it usually keeps connection very nicely. Be sure to put the device in the proper orientation through which you'll be looking at it, and THEN connect the adaptor (don't connect the adaptor and then have to roll the phone over to look at the screen, as this is the fastest way to kill the adaptor and loosen your phone's charging port). When first attaching, I plug the ethernet cable into the adaptor and use a hair-tie rubber band to wrap around the end of the ethernet cable, making sure it's tight with no slack, then I secure it around the BASE of the type-C cable coming out of the opposite end of the adaptor (see attached picture). Then LEAVE IT. If you incessantly disconnect and reconnect this adaptor, I guarantee it will not last as long. As for the features of this adaptor, I can only speak on the ethernet connection, the PD port, and the type-C 5gbps port. The PD port is nice because if you try connecting to the internet and doing pretty much anything without it, your device's battery is going to drain quite rapidly. How fast depends on how good your device's battery is to begin with. S10+ probably won't last half the time without PD as it does with PD. Just realize that your device is not going to gain power while charging through the PD port, but rather the battery will merely die at a slower pace, giving you more time before having to recharge your device. The other factor is how long your charging cable is (the shorter it is, the longer the battery will last). Tip: While using PD port, your device will not warn you of your battery about to die since it is technically charging, so if you're doing something important, you had better keep an eye on your battery percentage, lest it dies unexpectedly. I've not used the hdmi port at all, so nothing to speak on there. The 5gbps type-c port is nice if you want to connect an external hard drive while either A: connected to the internet, B: still being able to charge your phone, or both! I use the Samsung Portable SSD T7, and the Anker is great for saving large videos/files straight from the internet onto the external hard drive. The Anker is also good for freeing up space on your phone by moving existing files to the hard drive while continuing to charge your phone (otherwise, the hard drive connects directly to your phone, so your charging port is being used, and if your battery is low, no charging). Also, if you disconnected the ethernet cable from the Anker while moving files to an external drive, I suspect that the PD port would actually add battery percentage instead of merely slowing down the loss of battery percentage. To summarize: - Don't get Wi-fried: use a hard-wired ethernet connection instead! - Great adaptor that lasts longer than all others I've tried. - PD is a must have feature, but your device will still eventually die. - Great for saving videos/large files straight from internet to external hard drive while being able to charge device simultaneously. This Anker is the one you're looking for! Cheers.
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Reviewed in the United States on December 15, 2022
A
Verified Purchase
Amiga95
Boise, US
★★★★★ 5
Excellent quality with just the right amount and type of connection points I needed!
Extremely good quality. I've used many Anker product over the years and this one didn't disappoint! Needed it to run a laptop on my network in isolation mode and to have accessible connections for ethernet as well as a wireless mouse and extra cooling fan as my laptop has only 1 standard size USB 3.0 port. This is the mini version so It won't necessarily supply enough juice to charge your laptop at the same time (there's another 8 in 1 made by Anker for that) but it can supply enough power to maybe get you through a very trying session, very short term. Super-easy to connect and just works. Fits comfortably in my carry bag too. Very light weight, good heat dissipation although I didn't really have any or at least not much. Compatible with all the connectors you see in the picture. In my case at least, it wasn't a luxury it was a necessity and it proved it's value immediately.
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Reviewed in the United States on April 26, 2026

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