Randall Munroe’s mind- bending Art of Seeing Sideways

7 min readFeb 26, 2020

An analysis of the entertaining book “How To”

Who is Randall Munroe :

Randall Munroe is the author of the #1 New York Times bestsellers What If? and Thing Explainer, the science question-and-answer blog What If, and the popular webcomic xkcd. A former NASA roboticist, he left the agency in 2006 to draw comics on the internet full-time. He lives in Massachusetts. xkcd, sometimes styled XKCD, is a webcomic created in 2005 by American author Randall Munroe. The comic’s tagline describes it as “A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language”. Munroe states on the comic’s website that the name of the comic is not an initialism, but “just a word with no phonetic pronunciation”. According to Munroe, the comic’s name has no particular significance and is simply a four-letter word without a phonetic pronunciation, something he describes as “a treasured and carefully guarded point in the space of four-character strings.” In January 2006, the comic was split off into its own website, created in collaboration with Derek Radtke.

Randall Munroe’s popular book “How To: Absurd Scientific Advice for Common Real-World Problems”

“Absurd Scientific Advice for Common Real-World Problems” on the surface looks like one big joke. Even the disclaimer states “Do not try this at home.” However, slowing down and reading the book including the amusing foot-notes you will find some real-world physics that can actually be applied or understood in a different context. The author, Randall Munroe is a real physicist hiding behind a cartoon.

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 is 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 are 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 does not just make things difficult for himself and his readers. This book is full of clever infographics and fun illustrations. It is also a delightfully mind-bending way to better understand the science and technology underlying the things we do every day. It can make you laugh while you learn. With this book, 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 this fantastic book. Munroe creates another fun series of questions and answers that explore forces, properties, and natural phenomena through pop-culture scenarios. The solutions are often hilariously, and purposefully, absurd. Embedded in these solutions, however, is solid scientific, engineering, and experimental understanding. As he did so brilliantly in his book What If?, Munroe invites us to explore the most absurd reaches of the possible.

This book often gives readers a break from the “meal” by giving them “candy”. This candy is what readers will share with their friends, little tidbits that they will remember. Listen carefully to the musicality of this book, it will take a new dimension. Learn the terms, teach them to your audience, feel part of a niche community. The jargons in this book are not only a great way to introduce your audience into the subject, it can also help them experience emotions they would not have had otherwise. “Good writing does not succeed or fail on the strength of its ability to persuade. It succeeds or fails on the strength of its ability to engage you, to make you think, to give you a glimpse into someone else’s head.” — Malcolm Gladwell

Before proceeding further, we may have to dwell on various terms : Thinking (deeply as well as clearly), imagination, abstraction and reality. The ability to think gives us the ability to judge. The ability to judge means that we can learn to make decisions over the course of time, accounting for first and second and third-order effects of our choices, rather than just reactively responding to stimuli in our environment. This is the birth of abstraction. In order to problem-solve across time, we detach the process of thinking from the here and now, and we abstract it away into our imagination.

The imagination can be a great place. It can allow us to look ahead, to manage uncertainty there, and then use that thought process to better interact with reality as it comes along. But what the imagination can’t do is perfectly map or predict reality, because, it’s not reality itself. When we think deeply, whether that be through philosophical or mathematical language, it’s a purely a creative act. But reality is messy, and as the meanings behind words and formulae get more and more detached from direct experience — from the real risk of living — the more we get lost in the mess.

Just as thinking deeply can lead to deep and original insights, in the wrong context, it also poses a higher risk of leading us to deep and unproductive insights. Without clarity as a foundation, depth can just as well venture towards delusion as it can truth. Clarity looks outward, whereas depth looks inward, and though the ideal would be to harmonize the two, outward-facing clarity has to come first. Let us search for some other way of looking at things in a different context. Ah ! We have found it. Drum Rolls please !

Randall’s mind bending way to better understand Science and Technology :

1) The Physics of Pole Vaulting : In pole vaulting, athletes start running, stick a pole into the ground in front of them, and launch themselves into the air. Pole vaulters can fling themselves several times higher than the unassisted high jumpers. The Physics of Pole vaulting are interesting. This don’t revolve around the pole nearly as much as you might think. The key to vaulting is not the springiness of the pole. It is the athlete’s running speed. The pole is just an efficient way to redirect that speed upward. In theory, the vaulter could use some other method to change direction from forward to up. Instead of sticking a pole in the ground, they could jump onto a skateboard, go up a smooth curved ramp, and reach just about exactly the same height as the vaulter. We can estimate a pole vaulter’s maximum height using simple physics. A champion sprinter can run 100 metres in 10 seconds. If an object is launched upward at that speed under Earth’s gravity, a little maths can tell us how it should go.

Height = Speed2 / 2 x acceleration of gravity = (100metres divided by 10 seconds) /2 x 9.805 m/sec2 — = 5.10 metres. Since the pole vaulter is running before they jump, their center of gravity starts off above the ground already, which adds to the final height it reaches. A normal adult’s center of gravity is somewhere in their abdomen, usually at a height of about 55 percent of their actual height. Renaud Lavillenie, the world record holder in the men’s pole vault is 1.77 metres tall, so his center of gravity adds another 0.97 metres or so, giving a final predicted height of 6.08 metres. How does our prediction compare to reality? Well, the actual world record height is 6.16 metres. That is pretty close for a quick approximation.

2) How to Chase a Tornado Fig 2

3) How to Build a Highway Fig 3

4) A Sarcastic Attempt to explain AI and Deep Learning Fig 4

5) Randall Munroe and the Art of Seeing Sideways (Part 1 and 2)

6) Randall Munroe offers both the Salad and Candy