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NEW YORK — Have you ever wondered how to prognosticate the weather , put down an airplane onto a moving geartrain , or knock a poke out of the sky with sports equipment ? Randall Munroe , creator of the popular scientific discipline webcomic xkcd , has a unexampled book that presents outrageous solutions for a full chain of problems , from the mundane to the unusual .
In " How To : Absurd Scientific Advice for Common Real - World Problems " ( Penguin Random House , 2019 ) , Munroe harness challenges that are often a part of quotidian spirit . He shared highlights from the book with a rapt audience at New York Comic Con on Oct. 3 .
It could work. Maybe.
Be forewarned : None of his suggestions is easy — in fact , they ’re about as convoluted and complicated as possible . Let ’s say you wantto cross a river , which you could accomplish by simply swimming across . Munroe offers interesting but less practical alternative : leap the river in a railway car ; freezing the water or boil it away ; and fly from coin bank to bank on a cosmic string of kites . And he expend skill to excuse how each of these selection might be possible ( if not inevitably hard-nosed ) .
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" I ’m one of those masses who always comes up with impractical solvent to things — but usually , I ’m not trying to come up with an airy root , " Munroe told Live Science . Rather , he ’s look for timesavers for undertaking that are ho-hum and repetitive " something that would take a slight while now to get mark up , but once I did it could actually save me time in the retentive run , " he explain .
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" And whenever I find myself think ' save me time in the long running game , ' I know I ’m about to do something that will unquestionably take up more time than it could possibly keep open , " he say .
Do you call for to move to a Modern home ? You could lease a moving truck and pack everything into bag and boxes . But perhaps you ’d rather not pack , and you ’d prefer to just move your entire home ? In that suit , you might try out lifting your menage with a quadcopter — four helicopters desexualise to a rigid frame — an engineering challenge that was actually investigated by the U.S. military machine duringthe Cold War , Munroe wrote .
What if you were on an airplane , and you postulate to make an pinch landing ? Munroe turned to retired Canadian cosmonaut Col . Chris Hadfield for answers ; Hadfield is also a tryout pilot who has flown about 100 different types of aircraft for the Canadian and U.S. militaries , Munroe told the audience at Comic Con .
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Naturally , Munroe come up with the weirdest hand brake - bring scenario that he could think of , with every question just a lilliputian more ridiculous than the one before : from land a plane on a ski parachuting ( " you ’d have to time it just right " ) to landing theInternational Space Station(“odds are slim to none " ) .
" The joke was on me , because he [ Hadfield ] just answer all of them forthwith , " Munroe told Live Science . " And a lot of the answers were , ' Oh yeah , I ’ve done that . ' "
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Munroe also enlisted the assistance of an expert to inquire the best way to knock a drone out of the sky , foretell ontennis ace Serena Williamsto lend a hand ( and a racket ) when he could n’t find good data point about the accuracy of remove target with a lawn tennis dish out . Williams oblige , light upon a drone from a distance of 40 feet ( 12 meters ) on her third endeavor .
However , even Williams agreed that just because it was physically potential for her todisable a dronewith a tennis serve , it believably would n’t be her go - to method should the situation ever arise , Munroe told the Comic Con consultation .
" I asked her , ' What do you imagine of this idea as a mode of shooting down drones ? ' She suppose , ' I think it ’s a pretty bad idea , ' " Munroe state .
Then again , sometimes so - call forged idea get the job done . Consider the prospect of gently lowering a bird of passage onto the surface of Mars with a hovering distance - Stephen Crane ; though this initially sounded laughable , NASAsuccessfully used this method tosend Curiosity to Marsin August 2012 , Munroe told Live Science .
" With NASA ’s give-and-take of their Curiosity rover , they say , ' No one ’s ever judge this before , and it did seem crazy to us when we retrieve of it . But every other idea had some fatal flaw and this one did n’t , ' " he articulate .
" It was neat seeing them admit they thought this was just as weird as we did — but they had done the math , and it look like a good estimation , and then it actually work ! So , sometimes these estimation do forge out , " Munroe said .
" How To : Absurd Scientific Advice for Common Real - World Problems " is usable to buy online atAmazon , Barnes & Nobleand other booksellers .
Originally published onLive scientific discipline .
