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

by Randall Munroe

The simplest way across a river is to ford it—which effectively just means pretending it’s not there, continuing to walk, and hoping for the best.

Immanuel Kant developed a rule called the “categorical imperative,” which was at the center of his idea of ethics. He expressed the rule in several different formulations; the second formulation read, in part, “Act in such a way that you treat humanity . . . never merely as a means to an end, but always at the same time as an end.”

Every now and then, videos circulate around the internet showing trained birds of prey snatching drones out of the sky. This is a concept we find instinctively satisfying, but any plan that calls for countering rogue machines by training animals to hurl themselves at them is probably a bad one. We wouldn’t enforce speed limits by training cheetahs to leap onto motorcycles.

Humans invented nuclear weapons in 1945. We detonated the first one to test whether they worked, then used another two in war. Once that war was over, we set off a few thousand more of them just to see what would happen.

The truth is, people are complicated, there are a lot of them, and no one is ever 100 percent sure why they do what they do or what they’re going to do next.