Putting the X in eXaggerate

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, how to, humor

Troubled by drones? Maybe you want to sunbathe without being on camera. If so, lookee here:

In this drawing "from life", we have Serena Williams downing a drone with her ace tennis serve, as drawn by Randall Munroe. The tale is told, and illustrated, in Chapter 22 of how to: absurd scientific advice for common real-world problems.

Mr. Munroe doesn't tell us how he got Ms Williams and her husband to help with this phase of "How to Catch a Drone"; it seems they were already on speaking terms. That's not all there is to the chapter, however. A lot of things can intercept a drone, most of them illegal, all of them (including a Williams serve) rather dangerous...to the recipient!

The cover of the book shows someone changing a light bulb while standing on two drones. I hope they are the ultra-high-capacity (and ultra-high-stability) kind. Curiously, there is no chapter on lightbulb-changing. That is probably just as well. In Chapter 21, "How to Take a Selfie", after discussing things like focal length, field of view, and the popularity of Selfie Sticks, Munroe takes us farther and farther afield: selfies with big towers, in which you and the tower appear of similar heights; selfies with the moon, or even the sun (ditto); and on to using other planets as backdrops, which requires bigger and bigger telescopes to image the celestial orb in question.

To use Venus as a "selfie companion", for example, you need to use the Palomar Telescope as the camera lens and stand on a mountaintop in an appropriate location four miles away, after doing the calculations to determine when Venus rises over that mountaintop. Considering that the angle Venus makes on the sky when it is in a good position to show a crescent is about one arc-minute (1/60th of a degree), and the apparent motion of Venus (and stars and everything) is 15°/hr or 15 arc-minutes per minute, so you'd have no more than two seconds in which to take the picture. Hmm. Make a hi-res video instead, and you can pick out the appropriate frame later. Miss the shot? You can try again in eight years.

The author gets into throwing things, and discusses the possibility that George Washington actually threw a silver dollar across the Rappahannock River. At the location of the event, the river is 372 feet wide. A strong thrower, throwing the dollar with a flat spin, can send it upwards of 450 feet, so it is quite possible. Washington liked throwing things, and he was good at it. I had to figure out, though, did he have a silver dollar to throw? I looked up the history of the Philadelphia Mint. It first manufactured the "flowing hair" dollar in 1794, five years before Washington died. So, yes, silver dollars were available. Cool. The chapter "How to Throw Things", however, gets into a lot more kinds of throwing, going to extreme limits, as is done in each chapter (like, how far could Carly Rae Jepson throw George Washington?)

It's obvious, the book is great fun. It takes things a big, big step beyond the Mythbusters, but with the same motto: "Don't try this at home". Some of the things really could cook your goose (like the lava moat).