WWW.PUBLISHERSWEEKLY.COM 41ANSWER MAN
In How To, Randall Munroe uses his distinct style of
explaining the world to solve common problems
BY MIKE HARVKEY
O
riginating in sixth-century Zen Buddhism, the term mu means “no thing”—
not yes, not no—and is commonly interpreted as a rejection of binary
thinking. In the digital age, where everything is either a zero or a one, open-
source software advocates interpret mu as a query that demands a conceptual
rather than literal response, or, to put it another way, it requires
un-asking the question. Randall Munroe, the webcomic phenomenon and long-
time open-source advocate, has been un-asking questions for 14 years. Though
the titles of Munroe’s last two books—What If? and Thing Explainer—
promise answers, even instruction, their author takes such a tangential,
interrogative, inherently curious, and assumption-free approach to
problem solving that the results end up being as absurd as they are
informative.
Take this quandary from Munroe’s latest book, How To: Absurd
Scientific Advice for Common Real-World Problems (Riverhead, Sept.):
“How to Move.” On the surface, the problem is simple enough:
transporting stuff from one place to another presents no imme-
diately confounding issues, beyond the obvious. “At some point
in the move,” Munroe writes, “many people take a look at all
their possessions, realize how much work will be involved in
moving, and realize that it would be easier to push everything
into a hole and walk away, leaving it all behind. This is
absolutely an option! Should you decide to take this route,
turn to chapter 3: How to Dig a Hole.”
For those who want to keep what they own, Munroe has
some ideas. “Let’s say you can walk while carrying about 40
pounds,” he writes. “As a general rule of thumb, all the
furnishings and possessions in a typical 4-bedroom house will
weigh around 10,000 pounds, which means you’ll need to
take a total of 250 trips. If you have 3 people helping you, and
you can walk 10 miles a day, it will take you 7 years to move.”
A better solution could be to forgo packing and just move
the house. People do this every day, as anyone who has spent
much time on the interstate can attest. To puzzle out this solu-
tion, Munroe spoke with a friend whose job happened to be
issuing wide-load permits. It turns out they are highly restric-
tive. This could, he considers in the book, result in getting pulled
over, which might lead to a dispute over warrantless searches, and
the legal difference between a vehicle and a dwelling. “It’s just a
huge headache that people don’t realize,” Munroe says. “And it got
me thinking. Maybe you can bypass all that by just going up.”
Only Munroe would arrive at a solution to a simple problem that
required dismantling a 787 Dreamliner. “Most jet engines produce
©^ adr
ianne^
ma
th
iowetz