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... "
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.