Instant Genius - Randall Munroe: How do you find the worst solution to any problem?

Episode Date: November 14, 2019

If you need advice for the best way to move house, predict the weather or take a selfie, Randall Munroe, the creator of the webcomic xkcd, can’t help you. But if you’re willing to get creative, Randall’s book How To: Absurd Scientific Advice for Common Real-World Problems (£16.99, John Murray Press) will show you the worst ways to solve your problems, with some help from tennis star Serena Williams and astronaut Commander Chris Hadfield along the way. In this episode of the Science Focus Podcast, Randall talks to online assistant Sara Rigby about why the worst solution to a problem can be the most interesting. Subscribe to the Science Focus Podcast on these services: Acast, iTunes, Stitcher, RSS, Overcast Let us know what you think of the episode with a review or a comment wherever you listen to your podcasts. Listen to more episodes of the Science Focus Podcast: Bill Bryson: What should we know about how our bodies work? Jim Al-Khalili: Why should we care about science and scientists? Dr Tilly Blyth: How has art influenced science? Gretchen McCulloch: How has the internet affected how we communicate? Richard Dawkins: Can we live in a world without religion? Are Generation Z our only hope for the future? – John Higgs Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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commissioning editor at BBC Science Focus magazine. If you need advice for the best way to move house, predicts the weather or take a selfie, it's unlikely that Randall Monroe, creator of the web comic XKCD, can help you. But if you're willing to get creative, his book, How To, will show you the worst ways to solve your problems.

With some help from tennis star Serena Williams and astronaut, Commander Chris Hadfield. Here's Randall talking to online assistant Sarah Rigby about why the worst solution to a problem can be the most fun. So first of all, can you please describe your book How To? How To is sort of the world's least useful instruction manual for life. It teaches you how to do ordinary things, common household tasks

in really unwise but scientifically interesting ways. And so I have chapters on how to throw a pool party, how to get across a river, how to move, how to play football, which are mostly the worst ways I could think of to do those things. But then I get to analyze what will happen to you if you try them. And in many cases, it means going into some really interesting science research or calculations. So what gave you the idea for this book? I feel like I've always been coming up with really bad ways to do things. I mean, I just try to come up with ways to do things, and then usually they turn out to be really bad.

And it's a fun way to, like, I feel like I'm the kind of person who will always, you know, there will be some simple task to do and a bunch of people will have to do it. And everyone else will just go right into it in a straightforward way. and, you know, start on it. And I'll think, well, wait a minute, I have this idea for a way to do it that'll take a little bit more work, but then it'll be easier in the long run. And usually I'm still working on trying to get that working at all by the time everyone else is finished. So it's almost never useful. Like, I feel like almost every, with almost every task, I would be better off doing it the easy way,

you know, the straightforward way. but often by trying to do it the hard way, I'll learn something really interesting, even if it doesn't help me get that specific task done. So this book held two and your previous book, What If? A lot about thought experiments, aren't they? So what got you so interested in thought experiments in the first place? Well, I did a degree in physics, and I feel like people who study physics, you know, like, as you, you know, I don't know if this has been your experience. but I feel like it's often a struggle between, you know, the pure theory and pure math and very practical kind of engineering, where for me, anytime things get too abstract, you know, I like doing math and I like, you know, I took a lot of math classes, but I would tend to zone out

pretty quickly when things were, when I couldn't figure out what, how to apply things, you know, when I couldn't figure out like, okay, this is a really cool. I see that if you follow these steps, you can solve this equation. But if I don't know why I want to solve the equation, I had a hard time being interested, you know. And so I really like whenever I'm learning about something new, trying to think, how would I, what would this be useful for? How would I apply this to real life? But then when I'm actually trying to do something in real life, I immediately, you know, start discarding all of the practical sides of it. Because I want to think about the theory, too. I just, I go back and forth between those. So I think thought experiments can be a relief. fun way to take a physics concept and put it in concrete terms that are fun to think about and then make you interested in finding the answer. So for the ideas for this book, How To? Would you start from the task you're trying to achieve or would you start from the physics concept and try and work back and see how that could be useful? I did a little bit of both. For a lot of the chapters, I took a common task like that I found frustrating or that I was thinking, I wonder if there's a creative way to

do this, like moving, because packing to move is a huge headache than everyone hates doing that. And then I would think, okay, well, what are some ways that you could get around this, which might be a terrible idea, but are kind of interesting. Like, people sometimes move entire houses. And so I went through, you know, what are the problems of lifting up and moving a house? And what about could you attach jet engines to the side of the house and fly it somewhere? and then you don't have to worry about low bridges and things. But for a lot of other chapters, a lot of other subjects in it,

I found a really interesting piece of research, and I was reading about it and then trying to think, okay, how could you apply this to regular life, you know, or how could you, what could you do with this information? And so there was a piece of research. There was a paper by some seismologists at the university, in Barcelona, where their research

center was in a city where, and there was a Bruce Springsteen concert some blocks away. And they found that with their seismographic instruments, they could identify, not only they could pick up when people were dancing, because it caused the ground to shake. And so their

earthquake detection instruments picked up the vibrations from that. But they could even identify individual songs and pick them out on the the seismograph and figure out when he was playing born to run versus when he was playing born in the USA. And I thought that was really cool. So I included an illustration that was about how to listen to music, but it's just showing how to listen to music using a seismograph.

So when you come up with an idea, for example, how to take a selfie, what is your process of trying to come up with the most interesting ways to do that? I think I really just think about, I just try to think of as many ways to do it as I can. And then, you know, for each one, think what, okay, would this work or wouldn't it? And if it's not immediately obvious whether it would work or not, that's like the most interesting. Because then, oh, I'm going to have to learn something or do some cool calculation or somebody to try to figure this out. So I would, you know, and to me, it's sort of the same reason that answering what if questions is so much fun. is that the ones that most appeal to me are the ones where I sort of think I know what the answer is, but I don't know for sure. And then once I hear the question and once I have an idea that I think is right, but I don't know, I feel like it's like getting a song stuck in your head.

I just can't drop it until I found out, you know, figured out the answer. And so I would do that regardless of whether I was writing a book. You know, I'd sit there and think, okay, well, could you build a lava mode around your house? and then, oh, I have an idea for how I could figure that out, you know, how much it would cost, how hard it would be to provide the heat. And I'll just get fixated on answering that question and then not be able to rest until I do. And so at some point, I realized I should be writing all these down. Do ideas ever get too complicated? Oh, absolutely.

But I think I feel like any idea, like as long as you're not trying, you know, especially if you don't have a very, concrete set of limitations you're working in, any problem can get as complicated as you want. Any idea can get as difficult as you want. I think it was the writer Clifford Stoll talked about how when he did his PhD exam for astronomy, one of the examiners just asked for physics, asked him, okay, so why is the sky blue?

And he said, okay, well, because these wavelengths of light gets scattered. And then the examiner just kept saying, well, can you explain in more detail? And two hours later, they were deep in quantum mechanics and had run through all these different areas of physics, just trying to give more detail on exactly what happens when light hits the atmosphere. And I think that I try to do what I do with all of my questions is kind of try to take it up to the point, you know, as complicated as I can go, you know, or as interesting as I can go. and eventually, with any question, I'll hit a point where I can't answer it anymore. I mean, a simple question, part of what I like about physics is that there are these simple questions that are actually sort of unsolved.

The question of why ice skates slide on ice was really kind of, there have been some very recent theoretical breakthroughs that help explain exactly why ice is slippery. It's not as, there are a lot of wrong explanations out there. And similarly, like, we don't even, we don't really know where lightning comes from in thunderstorms. We know that charge builds up for some reason because of the air and maybe the water droplets moving in the storm. But we don't actually really understand why that causes charge to build up the way it does. And so, like, I feel like any question can get too complicated, very, if you just keep asking in a follow-ups. So at a couple of places in your book, you've gone for some expert advice, specifically the astronaut Chris Hadfield and even Serena Williams. So could you tell us a bit about that?

Oh, that was a lot of fun. I've done this a little bit with my previous books, you know, reached out to people who know how to, you know, who have expertise in something. But in this book, there were a lot of cases where I was looking at how to do something. And I realized there are some people who really know how to do this and it would be really fun to ask them, you know, to help me in one way or another. And so I got, I, I had a chapter on how to shoot down a drone with sports equipment. You know, how to, are you better off throwing a, if you have someone flying one of those wedding photography drones around you and you want to knock it down, are you better off using a baseball or, you know, kicking a football at it or throwing a basketball at it? You know, what,

and I used a bunch of sports science, but I didn't have a good source on tennis. And so I reached out to Serena Williams to ask if she'd be willing to hit a tennis ball at a target for me. And to my surprise, she was more than happy to try it, and her husband actually got a drone and flew it over the tennis court. And she served tennis balls at it until she managed to knock it out of the sky. which I thought was so incredibly cool. I was not asking them to sacrifice a drone for this. But everyone who I talked to was way more excited to help out than, you know, sort of I expected.

I kind of thought everyone would be like, well, I don't really understand why you want me to do this and why are you wasting. This is clearly, you know, a pointless exercise or something. But people were really into it. You threw some quite difficult questions at Chris Hadfield as well. I think my, that chapter, the chapter where I interview Chris Hadfield was, I think it's my favorite chapter in the book. It's a chapter on how to make an emergency landing, you know, if you're in an aircraft or something and you have to land in different scenarios. And I thought that I would interview him and, you know, I would just, my plan was to start asking him, you know, successively more and more.

ridiculous questions about how to land. And, you know, he's the commander of the International Space Station and the test pilot who's flown over a hundred different aircraft. So I figured, I would just ask these more and more ridiculous questions until he finally said, that's the, that's the stupidest thing I've ever heard and hung up on me. To my surprise, not only did he not hang up on me, he just, and not only did he not, you know, I was expecting him to give some answers. And, you know, I would then write my article about, you know, using his answers as a source. I'm quoting him now and then. But he just answered all the questions directly, like, with no hesitation. So I started off. I asked him if you, suppose you need to make an emergency landing, but all you can see is

farmers fields. What crop is best to aim for? You know, a taller one that provides more drag like corn or something low to the ground. That'll be a smoother surface. And I thought that was not too ridiculous, you know, kind of a ridiculous question, but it was a good one to start out with. And he just immediately said, well, I fly a little airplanes. And that's something we think about all the time. When you're driving to the airfield, you look around and you think, how high are the beans? Have they brought in their hay? Has it rained recently? Because you can't land in a muddy field. And then he started laying out which crops would be good and which crops would be bad. And even, you know, you can land in this, don't land in this, watch for hay bales, corn.

Corn, you can land in up until the middle of June. And then just sort of fell silent. Like, okay, next question. And so I started running through, you know, how do you land on an Olympic ski jump? How do you land on a, could you land on a moving train? I asked him that and he just said, oh, yeah, you can do that. Flatbed trucks, too. You see that sometimes at air shows. People have done that. And the hard part will be as a touchdown. The train moves up and down a little bit, which will bounce you. And that's the problem with landing on a truck, too, but it's absolutely doable. And all of his answers were in the kind of of very, you know, measured astronaut air traffic control voice where they never, you know, because they've been through so much training and so much drills, you know, they, they always report stuff in a very matter-of-fact way. And so I think it took me a little bit to realize that he was really enjoying answering the questions. And even when I got to the end, he said, you know, if you,

if you have any follow up, if you have any more of these questions, feel free to send them over by email, you know, and follow up. I'd love to answer more, you know. And I tried my very hardest with the weirdest questions I could, but I couldn't stump him. And I think I realized that maybe my plan of trying to stump a test pilot by throwing really extreme and surprising situations at them without any warning might have been flawed from the start. But I'm delighted with how it turned out. Well, those are the only chapters where you got some level of practical tests? in or any of the others, did you give anything a go? I did try.

There were a few other chapters where I talked to experts and asked for their advice or for their, you know, for information or something. There was a chapter, there was one chapter, though, on how to throw things, where I came up with kind of a very, very simple physics model for how throwing works. That it's one of those models that it, it isn't, you know, it isn't perfect. it's an approximation, but it does a good job of telling you how far any person of, you know, a given size, height, how far they can throw an object of a given weight. And you can kind of plug anything into this model and it gives kind of reasonable answers. So it gives reasonable answers for sports players.

You know, it says a baseball pitcher can probably throw a ball up to about 90 miles an hour and a football quarterback up to about 60 miles an hour. And those are roughly correct. And so then, but then I found you could plug in other things. So like, how far could I throw a blender? And it would give an answer, you know, exactly the same. I just have to tell it the weight and shape of the blender. And so I was curious, this was a really powerful model, even if it wasn't, you know, very precise. And so I was curious, is it telling me the right answers?

So before I put it in the book, I went outside with a friend and we got a bunch of random objects from our house. you know, a wood doorstop and a bicycle wheel and a bottle of water and a little bottle of hand sanitizer and a bunch of other random objects. And we went out into a field and marked off distances. And we both tried throwing them as far as we could to see if the model was giving answers that were kind of in the right ballpark. And it held up pretty well. I like that chapter actually because I was really impressed with the story about George Washington throwing the silver dollar across the river? Yes.

People love their stories about George Washington. There are a bunch of those. But yeah, there's the story that he threw a – it's one of those stories that it really wasn't published until after his death. And like many stories about George Washington, I think after he died, there was a big market for stories about him that made him seem larger than life or heroic. And a lot of people cashed in on that by publishing.

a lot of stuff. So no one really knows which of these stories, what's the real basis for it? So in some versions, it's a silver dollar. In some versions, it's a rock shaped like a silver dollar. In some versions, the river is the Rappahannock, but in other ones, it's the Potomac, which is probably much too wide for a person to throw things across. But yeah, these, these, the stories of George Washington through something coin shaped over some river, we seem pretty sure of. And you've managed to prove scientifically that he probably could have done it. Yes.

Well, I tried putting in silver dollar, you know, into these drag equations. And I found depending on how the coin was flying, if it was tumbling end over end, I think it would be very hard to throw it over even the smallest of the rivers that he, that, you know, this feat is ascribed to. but if it is kind of spinning like a frisbee, you know, or a disc or whatever, then I think it, my model says that it would be, that it would be possible, you know, that you could throw a silver dollar about 400 feet if you're a fairly athletic person who is six foot two, like George Washington. And, but I don't, you don't actually have to, you know, take my word for this because several baseball pitchers and also other, other people have, have tried to, you know, have tried

replicate this feat. And especially in the 1930s, there were a couple of different famous Major League Baseball players who, for some promotion or other, tried throwing a silver dollar over a couple of different rivers, including the Rappahannock, and were able to do it successfully or at least get it pretty close. So it's not clear whether or not, we don't know for sure whether he did do it, but I think it's believable that he could have. Is there any advice in this book that you think some of your readers could potentially follow? For the most part, I think my advice is, you know, the chapter will kind of show you an idea for something you might do, but then the rest of the chapter is showing you in excruciating detail why it wouldn't be a good idea, you know, or what would happen, why it wouldn't work, you know, or why it's not as good fun and idea as it sounds. There are a few chapters where I am actually talking about something where you could try it.

It's just very difficult. In particular, the chapter on how to take a selfie, I have an interest in space and a little bit in photography. And so I've had fun over the years playing with telephoto lenses and trying to take really unusual photos because if you if you line things up right you can take a photo of a person walking in front of the setting sun or the moon um the moon is easier because you aren't going to destroy your camera or eyepiece and and you but you have to line everything up just right and what i and i've managed to take some pictures like that uh and so i talk in the you know in this book a little bit about how to do that how to line things up and you know uh and how far away you have to be to take one of these cool photos

of a person silhouetted against the moon. But I also think that it is theoretically possible to take such a photo using Jupiter or Venus. But I've asked a couple of astronomy and space photography friends. I don't think anyone has done it before. But they may have, and I just haven't heard about it. So I put a note in the book about, you know, in theory, if you found the right pair of mountain tops

and did all the right computation and then got exactly lucky with the weather, you could take a photo of a person blurry, grainy, you know, but a person silhouetted against Jupiter. And I don't know if anyone has ever done that. So I'm sort of hoping that someone will send me try that or has already tried that and will post photos of it online. One of the examples of things you could potentially do in the book that I quite liked was judging the weather, predicting the weather, using people's Facebook photos. So could you tell us a bit about that? Yeah. The, the, you know, how to predict the weather, it's sort of a problem that we've,

that there is one, you know, the most practical solution, which is to look, look at weather forecasts. The, you know, the European and American governments and a couple of other organizations produce, produce these forecasts that, you know, use computer models, and they're accurate out to over a week. But, and beyond that, we, there's no other technique that gives any kind of better forecast. So, like, there is a good answer to that. But what's interesting is there are a lot of old, kind of folksy ideas for how to predict weather, like red sky at night, sailors delight, red sky at morning, sailors take warning, is a rhyme that's, that apparently dates back in some version or another, you know, for thousands of years.

And it turns out there is a grain of truth to it that because of how the atmosphere moves in the temperate zones, you know, in the middle latitudes, when the sun is setting, the reason that you get a red sky is because the sunlight is passing through lots of clear air to your west when it's setting. And you only get a really brilliant red sunset when there's lots, when the sun can take a very long, the sunlight can take a very long path through the air to get to you and to illuminate the clouds over you. But since weather in temperate zones moves from west to east, if there's a lot of clear air to your west, it means that there's unlikely to be bad weather moving toward you at the moment. now there could be a hurricane coming up from the south or something. It's not a hundred percent reliable. But it does tell you it's a hint as to the movement of the big,

large-scale low-pressure systems that kind of dominate rain and clear skies in those middle latitudes. So the rhyme actually does give you a little bit of a hint about what's coming up in the atmosphere a few days away or a day away. And I thought that was so cool. I never realized there was a physical basis for that rhyme I learned as a kid. And so what have you learned from writing this book that surprised you the most? Oh, I don't know. I think I was really surprised to learn. I mean, I feel like I was surprised to learn almost everything, you know, that I learned in the book or that I learned in the course of researching the book.

And I sort of like to put in things that I was surprised by or that I was excited by because I'm, I'm, just perpetually like, I learn a cool thing and I want to tell people about it, you know, often to a fault. But I think I would, there were some little tidbits that really, that I wasn't expecting. I have a chapter on how to mail a package from space. You know, you're up on the space station and you want to send a message or a package or a letter to Earth. And maybe for whatever reason, NASA is refusing to send it for you. And so, I look at how you could throw something in a way that would make it land on Earth. And I was really surprised when I was researching this to learn that there is some research suggesting,

you know, most things that you throw out of the space station will burn up in the atmosphere if they don't have a heat shield. But really thin and lightweight objects will slow down in the upper, very thin parts of the atmosphere where heat transfer doesn't happen as quickly. And so they may slow down enough to then fall gently without ever reaching high enough pressures and speeds where they heat up substantially. So there's a piece of research suggesting that a piece of paper, if it were folded right, you know, if it were a little bit curved, so it fell in the right way, could reenter the atmosphere intact without burning up. And there was even a proposal by, I think, some Japanese researchers to try throwing paper airplanes from the International Space Station, made of a kind of somewhat heat-resistant material, but that would, in theory, make it down somewhere on Earth intact. And then I guess they would have writing on them to be recovered. Sadly, that research never made it to actual experiment. But I thought that was so bizarre that a piece of baking paper, or even, even, maybe just a sturdy piece of paper, could be tossed out of the space station and flutter to the ground without burning up the way almost any other object would. That was a huge surprise to me. And so then that chapter got simpler. I said, you know, if what you need to send as a letter, you might not even

need to build any kind of mechanism at all. You can just toss it out the window and it'll make it to the ground intact. So you're most well known for your web comic XKCD. So what would you say was your favorite XKCD comic that you've ever done. Oh, that's a tough. That's a tough one. I don't know. I think I've done some, I've had, some of the ones that I've had the most fun doing are the infographics or charts where I'll just do a big map of something.

Like I did a map of, of, a bunch of movie plot lines where I show how the characters in big complicated stories like Lord of the Rings interact. And I've done some big maps and charts like that. but I think my favorite might be a comic I did in, I think it was 2012 or around then, called Click and Drag. And this was a sort of a single, there was a single big panel in this comic. And it was just a character talking about how the world turns out to be much bigger than they realized. And what I did with this panel was using JavaScript in the browser made it so that if you click on it, you can drag it like Google Maps. And so it starts off showing this character floating over a little scene with a tree and some grass.

But if you drag sideways, you can explore this world. And I tried to make it big enough that people would get tired of dragging before they could reach the edge. And I really, and I had a lot of fun with that. Because I just love the idea of, I love any story where people kind of discover that the world is bigger than they thought it was and get kind of that rush of realizing that there is so much more out there. And so that comic was kind of me trying to celebrate that and have fun with that. So what books do you want to write in the future? Oh, I don't know. I always feel like whenever I'm in the middle of a book that like I the idea I'm already daunted by all the things in front of me that like the idea of of thinking about a second book at the same time is it's just like my brain doesn't have room for that.

And so I'm I'm you know, I'll see. There's there's a lot of other. I don't know. I feel like there's no end of cool things that I want to do and we'll see which ones I'm actually. able to get to get through. But I do, I do have, there's a really good backlog of questions people have submitted to what if, which I haven't updated as much recently. And I'm, I am excited once this has died down to, to jump back into those and answer some of those, because there are some really cool ones. And what do you hope readers get from this book? I think that, I don't know, people say

sometimes like there are no bad ideas or, you know, there are no, there are no dumb questions or something. And and I don't think that's really true. But I do think that I like, that it can be hard to tell which questions or which ideas are bad. And so I want to, I think that really the biggest takeaway I want people to have is to kind of be humble about being sure they know whether something is good or bad. be willing to explore, you know, okay, this sounds silly on the surface, but maybe it makes sense. Let's work through it a little bit. But I think more than that, I want, I really want people to, I have a comic that I did a while ago about how for everything that, every fact that you think, oh, everyone knows that. Just by, by, by the fact of it. of new people being born all the time,

every day, there are tens of thousands or, you know, worldwide hundreds of thousands of people learning that fact for the first time. And so because of that, I try to never make fun of anyone for admitting that they don't know something because it's much, much better to get to teach, because that teaches them to not tell you when they're learning about something cool that you thought everyone knew, but they didn't know it. They're learning it for the first time. So I think I like to try to have people have a positive attitude toward people who don't know things and be excited to get to show them cool stuff instead of kind of teaching them to be embarrassed about not knowing the cool thing.

So I think that's really the biggest lesson I'd like to get, you know, like to get out there is, is there's lots of stuff. No one knows everything and it's fun to learn about it. and let's all try to go easy on each other as we all try to figure it out. And it's an opportunity to get everyone to share in the excitement of learning these cool new things. Yeah, yeah. Well, and that's one of my favorite things is I'll talk about, you know, I'll write about something and, you know, something cool that I've learned. And then someone will come back to me and say, oh, yeah, well, that's sort of similar to how this kind of, you know, factory works or this kind of scientific instrument or this kind of cool gymnastics practice. and oh, I had no idea about that.

You know, there's tons of stuff that I don't know anything about. And it's really cool to hear from people who, you know, because everyone knows something that other people don't know, you know. And so it's just cool to trade cool facts and cool ideas. That was Randall Monroe talking about his new book, How To, absurd scientific advice for common real-world problems. In this month's issue of BBC Science Focus magazine, we find out about the innovations that look to save the oceans

from the threats of climate change, biodiversity loss and acidification. We also speak to disability activist Adam Pearson about the notions of eugenics hidden in prenatal genetic testing and ask if peaceful protests can achieve meaningful change. Thank you for listening to the Science Focus podcast from the BBC Science Focus magazine team. With the UK's best-selling sites and technology monthly,

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