How To

How To will help you get better at abstract thinking as it gives solutions to some of the strangest problems in the wackiest, but still scientific, ways.

This book will teach you how to dig a hole deep enough to make a fortune on buried treasure. But once you have your riches, you’re going to want a way to protect your home from thieves. How does a moat sound? For extra protection, let’s make it a lava moat.

First, create lava. For that, you just need rocks and heat. Sounds simple enough, right? If you use the right rocks you only have to heat them to a modest 900 degrees Celsius. This will keep your lava moat glowing bright orange throughout the day and night.

But exposure to the air will constantly cool your lava and eventually turn it back into rock. You’re going to need to put insulated electric coils underneath your moat. The air takes about 100 kilowatts of energy from your 900 degree lava, so you need to put that much back into it from your coils. Let’s say energy costs about $0.10 per kilowatt hour. For a one meter wide and one meter deep moat around a typical house, this comes out to $60,000 a day.

I know you might be thinking this is crazy. You’re definitely wanting a wider moat than just one meter. But don’t fret. Anyone who tries to jump over it will get second-degree burns in less than a second just from the heated air! Oh and don’t worry about your house. You’ll just need to pump water through the walls to keep it from burning to the ground.

Getting to the stars requires a lot of time. That is, unless you know how to travel faster than the speed of light. Scientifically it’s impossible to do that, but with some work you can get a comparable effect. You’re going to want to start by building a rocket ship that can continually accelerate at 1g. In other words, in one second it’s speed increases as much as an object falling toward earth, or 9.8 meters per second. We could go faster, but our bodies aren’t great at handling those speeds. But this will do just fine. According to the math, at the rate of acceleration of 1g, you could reach the moon in only four hours! Jupiter would be outside your window within a week. The acceleration adds up quickly. Now, let’s talk about relativity. If you’re traveling faster, you experience time more slowly from an outside perspective. From your perspective, time moves more quickly for the observer. With more acceleration, you gain more distance traveled than you’d expect in one year…