How To [starts at 4:30] Our guest for this episode is Randall Munroe, perhaps best known for his comic xkcd, and author of the books “What If” and “Thing Explainer”. Randall has figured out how to do many things, so he wrote a new book appropriately called “How To”, which promises to provide absurd scientific advice for common real world problems. Absurd? Sometimes. (well, often actually) Amusing and informative? Definitely. Have you ever wanted to build a lava moat? Have you ever wondered what kind of gas mileage your house would get on the highway? What are the energy requirements and logistics of boiling vs. freezing a river? And what about landing an airplane on a submarine? All of those questions and more (pirates!) are addressed in “How To”, and we talk about some of them in this episode of How on Earth.
Host, Producer, Engineer: Joel Parker
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This July, I saw my first fake news in science on Google News. An article claimed that comet 168P/Hergenrother was gonna get so bright that we might be able to see it in daytime. This was news to me. I went to the venerable Japanese site http://www.aerith.net/ – the comet was gonna get to Mag11 – more likely 14. WTF, I says to myself … 2 hours later the article was pulled. I suspect someone was demonstrating their mad skilz in SEO on a topic that nobody except very few people would recognize as bogus. Now, since I’ve been doing skygazing forever, that article was in my area of interest – and apolitical. It makes me wonder how many bogus articles are out there that are apolitical … forget political. I love your program, KGNU listener-member-volunteer.