How to: Unrealistically solving practical problems

A very interesting book. You will learn (but are not limited to):

How to land an airliner on an aircraft carrier without an arresting hook installed?

How to land on an enemy aircraft carrier?

How to land on the International Space Station? (Of course, it only ensures you can land — it doesn't guarantee you'll survive)

Sometimes water only ankle-deep can knock a person down

The weight of Earth's atmosphere is equivalent to a 10-meter-deep layer of water. To figure out whether a meteor can punch through it, you can imagine it actually hitting a 10-meter layer of water. If something is heavier than the amount of water it displaces when it reaches the ground, then it will most likely be able to punch through to the surface.

A space shuttle could be forced to deorbit anywhere in the world; the crew carries a book that contains charts of all runways, like a big picture book showing information such as runway orientations.

Pole vault: the height you clear actually has far less to do with the pole than you might think. The key isn't how elastic the pole is, but how fast the athlete runs. The pole is merely a good tool for converting forward speed into upward motion. In theory, an athlete could change direction by other means. For example, instead of a pole they could jump onto a skateboard and ride up a smooth curved ramp to reach nearly the same height.

Ice is heavy; when piled on land it pulls the ocean slightly toward itself. When the ice melts, the global average sea level will rise, but because the ocean is no longer being pulled as strongly toward the land where the ice was, sea level around the areas where the ice melted will actually fall.