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

by Randall Munroe

I don’t like making fun of people for admitting they don’t know something or never learned how to do something. Because if you do that, all it does is teach them not to tell you when they’re learning something . . . and you miss out on the fun.

However, that’s measured from the ground. Since high jumpers tend to be tall, their center of mass starts off several feet off the ground, and because of how they fold their bodies to pass over the bar, their center of mass may actually pass under it.

In many areas, online retailers like Amazon offer same-day delivery. A 24-pack of Fiji water bottles currently costs about $25. If you have $150,000 to spare—plus another $100,000 or so for same-day delivery—you can simply order a pool in bottle form.

Could you open bottles using nuclear bombs? This is a completely ridiculous suggestion, so it should come as no surprise that it was studied by the US government during the Cold War.

report titled The Effect of Nuclear Explosions on Commercially Packaged Beverages,

Nowadays, if you want hydrogen, the best place to get it is by collecting and reprocessing the byproduct of fossil fuel extraction.

This might explain why some companies like Toyota think it's better technology when compared to battery electric vehicles.

As the sea rises and falls, it presses rhythmically against the air, behaving like the surface of a huge, slow music speaker—the loudest, deepest subwoofer on the planet.

There was a DC-10 that lost all hydraulics, over Sioux City, and the pilots managed to get control and steer that airplane all the way around to the runway using only the throttles.

FIFA’s Laws of the Game, the official rules for association football, do not contain the word “horse,”* so you could try to make an Air Bud argument: there’s no rule in the books that says you can’t use a horse in football. There are rules against equipment, but a horse isn’t equipment—it’s a horse.

If you print your message on a sheet of baking parchment paper, aluminum foil, or some other thin and lightweight material which can survive being warmed up, you might just be able to toss it out the door as is. As long as it’s shaped right, it could make it to the ground intact. In fact, a team of Japanese researchers planned to try this by launching paper airplanes from the ISS. They designed the planes to survive the heat and pressure of reentry, but, sadly, the project never went through.

The world has more wind than rivers; the total energy carried by rivers is on the order of a terawatt, while the total energy carried by wind is closer to a petawatt.

In the 20th century, medical advances made the vaccine easier to produce and transport around the world, leading to a global campaign to eradicate smallpox completely. It succeeded: the last smallpox infection “in the wild” occurred in Somalia in 1977, and the last outbreak in history—and the final smallpox death—happened after a lab accident in 1978.

These ancient trees aren’t immortal—they’ve just figured out how to die slowly.

The world’s tallest known tree is a coast redwood dubbed “Hyperion.” Discovered in 2006, it stands just shy of 116 meters tall.

Before Hyperion’s measurement was revealed in 2006, the record holder was the 113-meter “Stratosphere Giant,” another northern California coast redwood.

Currently, America’s only long-term permanent underground waste disposal site is a series of chambers 2,000 feet below the New Mexico desert. The complex, called the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, continues to accept a portion of our nuclear waste, but until a new permanent disposal site is chosen or the WIPP facility is expanded, we’re solving this problem the way we so often do: by trying not to think about it and hoping it goes away.

launching directly to the Sun from Earth is really difficult—it actually takes more fuel than launching something out of the Solar System completely. A more efficient way to reach the Sun is to launch something to the far outer Solar System—possibly with the help of gravity assists from the planets. When it’s far from the Sun, it will be moving very slowly, and it will only take a little extra fuel to slow it to a halt—after which it will fall directly toward the Sun.