Excerpts-

• From the cover How to Catch a Drone
  A wedding-photography drone is buzzing around above you. You don’t know what it’s doing there and you want it to stop.
  
  Let’s suppose you have a garage full of sports equipment— baseballs, tennis rackets, lawn darts, you name it. Which sport’s projectiles would work best for hitting a drone? And who would make the best anti-drone guard? A baseball pitcher? A basketball player? A tennis player? A golfer? Someone else?
  
  There are a few factors to consider — accuracy, weight, range, and projectile size.
  
  One sport I couldn’t find good data on was tennis. I found some studies of tennis pro accuracy, but they involved hitting targets marked on the court, rather than in the air.
  
  So I reached out to Serena Williams.
  
  To my pleasant surprise, she was happy to help out. Her husband, Alexis, offered a sacrificial drone, a DJI Mavic Pro 2 with a broken camera. They headed out to her practice court to see how effective the world’s best tennis player would be at fending off a robot invasion.
  
  The few studies I could find suggested tennis players would score relatively low com- pared to athletes who threw projectiles— more like kickers than pitchers. My tentative guess was that a champion player would have an accuracy ratio around 50 when serving, and take 5–7 tries to hit a drone from 40 feet. (Would a tennis ball even knock down a drone? Maybe it would just ricochet off and cause the drone to wobble! I had so many questions.)
  
  Alexis flew the drone over the net and hovered there, while Serena served from the baseline.
  Her first serve went low. The second zipped past the drone to one side.
  
  The third serve scored a direct hit on one of the propellers. The drone spun, momentarily seemed like it might stay in the air, then flipped over and smashed into the court. Serena started laughing as Alexis walked over to investigate the crash site, where the drone lay on the court near several propeller fragments.
  
  I had expected a tennis pro would be able to hit the drone in five to seven tries; she got it in three.

About the Author-

• RANDALL MUNROE is the author of the #1 New York Times bestsellers What If? and Thing Explainer, the science question-and-answer blog What If, and the popular webcomic xkcd. A former NASA roboticist, he left the agency in 2006 to draw comics on the internet full-time. He lives in Massachusetts.

Reviews-

• If you've ever wondered how to contain an above-ground pool with just cheese, or how to open many thousands of water bottles at the same time with nuclear weapons in order to fill your pool, this is the audiobook for you. And while the audiobook cannot provide the illustrations that the physical book includes, Wil Wheaton's friendly and straightforward narration style paired with occasionally exaggerated theatrical moments more than make up for them. Wheaton's conversational tone creates an excellent juxtaposition with the author's dry humor and embellished scientific commentary, giving listeners a delightful learning experience that frequently finds them laughing out loud. A truly enjoyable listen that really delivers on its subtitle. A.K.R. © AudioFile 2019, Portland, Maine
• 

  Starred review from June 17, 2019
  Munroe (Thing Explainer), a former NASA roboticist and creator of the popular webcomic xkcd, offers a witty, educational examination of “unusual approaches to common tasks, and... what would happen to you if you tried them.” Each chapter explores scientific problems with often Rube Goldbergian solutions; in “How to Cross a River,” one could freeze the river, but, due to the second law of thermodynamics, only with a device “fed by a river of gasoline... comparable in size to the river you want to freeze.” To fill a backyard pool, one could siphon H2O from a neighbor living at a higher elevation, buy a ton of bottled water (necessitating industrial plastic shredders to efficiently extract the liquid), or create one’s own water. The text is generously laced with dry humor (“Playing the piano isn’t very hard, in the sense that the keys are all easy to reach and they don’t take very much force to push down”), and Munroe’s comic stick-figure art is an added bonus. But apart from generating laughter, the book also manages to achieve his serious objective: to get his audience thinking “of ideas and then trying to decide whether they’re good or not.” Agent: Seth Fishman, Gernert Company.

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