A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language.

Unfortunately, KM3NeT led to the discovery of the Pauli anglerfish, which emits Cherenkov radiation to prey on neutrino researchers.

#pugglewumper Tashari got me some ink pens! I've been experimenting with them.

I had fun visiting the museum at Dover Air Force Base, unless they don't have a museum, in which case I've never been to Delaware in my life.

Everything is a cloud application; the ping times just vary a lot.

After determining that his body was full of pipes carrying iron-rich fluid, our current theory is that the dagger-shaped object precipitated within the wound.

Crap, I have levitation class at 25:131. Better set the alarm to 'cinnamon'.

Cue angry letters from all seven fans of Xenocide.

It'll be hilarious the first few times this happens.

Evidence suggests the 1899 transactions occurred as part of a global event centered around a deity associated with the lotus flower.

I was, at least at the start of this disastrous game night, your friend.

... go go gadget video camera. Go go gadget cup.

According to every stud finder I've tried to use, my walls contain a rapidly shifting network of hundreds and hundreds of studs.

There's nothing hotter than porn dubbed over with a poorly-mic'd teenager's voice explaining each step in a droning monotone. 'okay, we're almost at the spawn point ... separate the labia, but watch out, there are more inside them ..."

I can't speak to the paper's scientific merits, but it's really cool how on page 10 you can see that their reference GPS beacon is sensitive enough to pick up continential drift under the detector (interrupted halfway through by an earthquake).

The xkcd.com sysadmin has a Q2010, and I can attest that it can handle a fall down several flight of concrete steps. Relatedly, he's upset with me -- I hope he doesn't take revenge by messing with my site's contenDISREGARD THAT I SUCK COCKS

Gonna start bugging the Unicode consortium to add snake segment characters that can be combined into an arbitrary-length non-breaking snake.

Although I hear they were caught cheating off of Rosalind, who sat at a desk in front of them.

If you find and stop the video, but you've--against all odds--gotten curious about the trade summit, just leave the tab opened. It will mysteriously start playing again 30 minutes later!

Changes with this update: If you use the combined scan-shred function, it now performs them in that order instead of the reverse, saving a HUGE amount of CPU time.

I may have also tossed one of a pair of teleportation rings into the ocean, with interesting results.

"Measure zero times, cut zero times." --carpenter who has achieved enlightenment and realized the wood is fine where it is

The USGS operates a really neat email/SMS earthquake notification service (earthquake.usgs.gov/ens/) that allows fine-grained control of notifications.

Freestyle rapping is basically applied Markov chains.

'The light from those millions of stars you see is probably many thousands of years old' is a rare example of laypeople substantially OVERestimating astronomical numbers.

'So how DID you go from working at the employment records office to becoming president of MIT and CEO of IBM?' 'I guess I just have an eye for opportunities.'

The growth rate of items per day may may seem absurd, but it's actually much less than the acceleration in the 12 Days of Christmas song.

Just think of all the countless petty squabbles and misunderstandings, of all the fervent hatreds, over so insignificant a thing as the direction and duration of a rocket engine firing.

Sure, T. rex is closer in height to Stegosaurus than a sparrow. But that doesn't tell you much; 'Dinosaur Comics' author Ryan North is closer in height to certain dinosaurs than to the average human.

Wavefunction collapse is only one interpretation. Under some interpretations, graduate students also have souls.

We can't let this happen again. We need to build a secure TWO-day-before-retirement safe room.

June 21st, 365, the date of the big Mediterranean earthquake and tsunami, lived in infamy for a few centuries before fading. Maybe the trick is a catchy rhyme; the '5th of November' thing is still going strong over 400 years later.

'Automating' comes from the roots 'auto-' meaning 'self-', and 'mating', meaning 'screwing'.

Rümeysa Öztürk was grabbed off the street in my town one month ago.

Imagine you could ride alongside a sound wave. It would probably be pretty cool, right? We're putting in a departmental budget request to buy a really fast plane so we can check it out.

Sometimes an impulsive 2:00 AM cross-country trip is the only solution.

Maybe someday I'll get to write the Wikipedia article about this place! Wait, damn, original research.

I was going to get you an alarm clock that occasionally goes off randomly in the middle of the night, but you can ignore it and go back to sleep and it's fine.

Last-minute course change: Let's see if we can hit Steve's house.

We have email and social media now, so we probably don't need to keep exchanging business cards by pressing them gently against each others' faces with an open palm and smearing them around.

WARNING: PEOPLE NAMED EVE ARE PROHIBITED FROM INSTALLING THIS APP!

In months other than September, the 11th is mentioned substantially less often than any other date. It's been that way since long before 9/11 and I have no idea why.

There are a lot of books on marketing out there. I wonder if you're safest just buying the most popular one.

NOTIFICATION: Now dismissing a head of the Notification Hydra… NOTIFICATION: Success! You have dismissed a head of the Notification Hydra!

'Your chitin armor is no match for our iron-tipped stingers! Better go hide in your jars!' --common playground taunt

'That's definitely above the catch-and-release size minimum for planetesimals.' 'I'm going to throw it back anyway.'

Further out to the right, it works correctly, but the reason it works still involves the word 'firmware.'

'I was pretty good at skeet shooting, but was eventually kicked off the range for catching the clay pigeons in a net and dispatching them execution-style.'

They've endowed a separate prize in Physiology or Medicine or Stopping Dr. Adams.

Escape Artist Frees Self From Conversation With Pickup Artist

"Oh my God, why did you scotch-tape a bunch of hammers together?" "It's ok! Nothing depends on this wall being destroyed efficiently."

If they're getting valuable enough stuff from you, at least the organized crime folks have an incentive to issue regular updates to keep the appliance working after the manufacturer discontinues support.

If I click 'no', I've probably given up on everything, so don't bother taking me to the page I was trying to go to. Just drop me on the homepage. Thanks.

ONE LAPTOP PER HAMSTER!

I don't care whether you win or lose, as long as you have-- ...okay, sorry, I'm being reminded I very much care whether you win or lose. I need you to win, that's very important.

It's rare to get both astronomers and astrologers equally mad at you, but apparently I've messed up both a bunch of star location databases AND the will of the fates.

I've got the Craigslist post ready to go! I wasn't sure what category it should go in, so I listed it as property and put that it has 'good sun exposure.'

I should make a list of all the things I could be trying to optimize, prioritized by ... well, I guess there are a few different variables I could use. I'll create a spreadsheet ...

Hang on, I just remembered another thing I'm right about. See...

40% of OpenBSD installs lead to shark attacks. It's their only standing security issue.

And it says a lot about you that when your friends jump off a bridge en masse, your first thought is apparently 'my friends are all foolish and I won't be like them' and not 'are my friends ok?'.

They're not generally used for crewed spacecraft because astronauts HATE going around the corners.

People ask me whether I feel any moral qualms about the source of the points, but if he hadn't introduced factory farming to Agricola, someone else would have.

Fuck it. I'm just going to Waffle House.

'But what's the buzz about the film?' 'We're hoping it's distracting.'

This was my friend David's idea

The worst is when you run out of monospaced fonts and have to use variable-width variables.

If you Huffman-coded all the 'random' things everyone on the internet has said over the years, you'd wind up with, like, 30 or 40 bytes *tops*.

I told her I'd take her address off the packaging if she'd stop submitting anonymous food safety complaints about my bakery to the health department, but she sent me a note that said NO DEAL along with an extra large batch of cookies.

I've developed a novel propulsion system powered by loss of precision in unit conversion.

"Sir, it looked really cool." "Oh no--prestige TV. Okay, which of you has a terrible secret that's being slowly revealed to the audience through flashbacks? Just spit it out so we can escape this arc!"

I could type this into a solver, which MIGHT help, but would also mean I have to get a lot of parentheses right...

For obvious reasons, the prize is awarded at a different time of year from the others, while it's still fresh in the committee's memory.

It's like sigma summation notation, except instead of summing the argument over all values of i, you 2 the argument over all values of 2.

The Super Bowl is actually an elaborate ruse, concocted by a shadowy group in the mid sixties for this purpose. The 'watch it for the ads' addition was a master stroke.

I have so many plans. It would incorporate a Galton board, a Ranque-Hilsch marble vortex tube, and a compartment lined with pinball bouncers with a camera-and-servo Maxwell's Demon that separated the balls into fast and slow sides.

The captain has turned on the 'fasten seat belt' sign.

Lucky. In MY dream, all the people who grew up loving The Giving Tree paired up with all the students who had weird dreams after reading The Metamorphosis. That one was more confusing.

'Am I taking care of you? I have a thesis to write!' 'My parents are at their house; you visited last--' 'No, no, explain like you're five.'

I recently learned something that solved a mystery that had bugged me since childhood--why, when I looked at an analog clock, the hand would sometimes seem to take a couple seconds to start ticking. Google "stopped clock illusion".

[shortly] ... he ate ALL of it!?

Was this your car? [looping 'image loading' animation]

The problem with perspective is that it's bidirectional.

Let's invite him to a party and play 'I never'. Okay, I never hid any bodies SOUTH of Main Street. ... he's taking a drink!

My shooting will improve over the short term, but over the long term the universe will take more shots.

Ma'am, I admit that wasn't in the best taste, but you have to admire my delivery! Ha ha, get it? Oh God, don't throw those syringes! Your baby's fine!

Hang on, I've heard this problem. We need to pour water into the duct until the phone floats up and ... wait, phones sink in water. Mercury. We need a vat of mercury to pour down the vent. That will definitely make this situation better and not worse.

After a power outage at the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, the new Digital Doomsday Clock is flashing 00:00 and mushroom clouds keep appearing and then retracting once a second.

Every time IERS adds or removes a leap second, they send me a birthday cake out of superstition.

NASCAR removed the passenger seats because drivers hated how astronauts kept riding along with them and loudly announcing "Ahh, what a nice and relaxing drive."

Two Hedwig references, an obscure Joey Comeau reference, and a girl with a mohawk. Yes.

Stockfish 16 suggests the unconventional opening 1. RuntimeError: Out of bounds memory access

Bruce Schneier believes safewords are fundamentally insecure and recommends that you ask your partner to stop via public key signature.

Listen, you're very cute, but if you rearrange the alphabet to put U and I together it will RUIN the spacing!

Don't turn it on.

After the test, she said that if she had a choice, she wouldn’t defend herself against drones using a tennis ball and racket, though she would absolutely pick them over other sports equipment. But, she added, "Drones don't bother me."

It's turtles all the way down.

"Are you concerned the witches won't breed in captivity?" "Honestly, we're more concerned that they WILL. We don't know what it involves, but our biologists theorize that it's 'harrowing.'"

Obligatory bad guy: This operation is sheer foolishness, and it's not happening on my watch! Mainly because I can't figure out how to adjust the time.

I bet my future kids will read this someday. DEAR FUTURE KIDS: how did you get internet in the cellar?

I just learned about the Slide Mountain Ocean, which I like because it's three nouns that sound like they can't possibly all refer to the same thing.

Our new video ad campaign has our product's name shouted in the first 500 milliseconds, so we can reach the people in adjacent rooms while the viewer is still turning down the volume.

I would never stoop to vandalism, but I'm not above discreetly deleting the occasional 'this article contains excessive amounts of detail' tag.

The Wikipedia page "List of Numbers" opens with "This list is incomplete; you can help by expanding it."

Detectives say the key to tracking down the source of the kites was a large wall map covered in thumbtacks and string. 'It's the first time that method has ever actually worked,' said a spokesperson.

Check it out; I've had sex with someone who's had sex with someone who's written a paper with Paul Erdős!

Our company is agile and lean with a focus on the long tail. Ok, our company is actually a polecat I found in my backyard.

Do YOU remember the skylight being this big?

About one in three North American subway stops are in NYC.

It was great until my thumb slipped and I accidentally launched my telescope into the air at Mach 8.

I hope no automatic doors I know read this. I would be so embarrassed.

The hard part about opening a hole in the proof of the Poincaré conjecture is that Grigori Perelman will come out of retirement to try to fix it by drawing a loop around the hole and contracting it to a point.

Borat came out twenty years ago this year--closer to the breakup of the Soviet Union than to today--but it honestly feels like it's been even longer, somehow.

There are a lot of graduate-educated young-earth creationists.

They'd use that Futurama episode with Fry's dog, but even spambots cry at that.

And when I think about it, a lot of "things I want to do" are just learning about and discussing new tools for tinkering with the chain.

Except for anything by Lewis Carroll or Tolkien, you get five made-up words per story. I'm looking at you, Anathem.

'... hosts were unexpectedly fired from ABC's 'The View' today. ABC will likely announce new ...'

::PLOOOOSH:: Looks like you won't be making it to Vinland today, Leaf Erikson.

The invisible hand of the market never texts me back.

Hmm, they won't do in-flight delivery, so let's order a new first and second stage to our emergency landing site and then try to touch down on top of them to save time.

This is a fun explanation to prepare your kids for; it's common and totally wrong. Good lines include 'why does the air have to travel on both sides at the same time?' and 'I saw the Wright brothers plane and those wings were curved the same on the top and bottom!'

And yet I have no trouble believing that the start of the 2016 election was several decades ago.

Oh yeah, I didn't even know they renamed it the Willis Tower in 2009, because I know a normal amount about skyscrapers.

When comparing hypotheses with Bayesian methods, the similar 'clickbayes factor' can account for some harder-to-quantify priors.

Under three ounces, but it stains panties.

Don't fire until you see through the fragile facade to the human being within.

That's my hat! You took my hat!

After years of trying various methods, I broke this habit by pitting my impatience against my laziness. I decoupled the action and the neurological reward by setting up a simple 30-second delay I had to wait through, in which I couldn't do anything else, before any new page or chat client would load (and only allowed one to run at once). The urge to check all those sites magically vanished--and my 'productive' computer use was unaffected.

I can't believe they wouldn't even let me hold a vote among the passengers about whether to try the loop.

Things were better before the Structuring and the Levels.

Later renouncing clickbait, Einstein called his inclusion of cosmological content in general relativity the biggest blunder of his career.

Protip: Any two-axis graph can be re-labeled 'coordinates of the ants crawling across my screen as a function of time'.

I've been sneaking out at night and installing lamps on the underside of every photovoltaic panel I can find. Sure, there are upwards of 80% losses, but I prefer to think of them as nearly 20% gains.

A medicine that makes you put two dots over your letters more often is a diäretic.

The Street View van isn't going to find out anything Google won't already know from reading my email.

People keep telling me to use the radio but I really hate making voice calls.

A childhood spent walking while reading books has prepared me unexpectedly well for today's world.

This doesn't take into account the energy imparted by orbital motion (or gravity assists or the Oberth effect), all of which can make it easier to reach outer planets.

Created by the collapse of: [massive stars] [Florida limestone bedrock]

Communication is one of the most popular ways to transmit information, ahead of rivals such as

Inflationary cosmologists call all music from after the first 10^-30 seconds "post-"

We reject the null hypothesis based on the 'hot damn, check out this chart' test.

I was really impressed by the accuracy of some of the report's predictions about fossil fuel consumption. Then I realized, oh, right, of course.

I'm not totally locked into my routine—twice a year, I take a break to change the batteries in my smoke detectors.

Welcome to the Linguistics Department - It has been [2] [DAYS] since someone noticed that the Biology Department sign has a one-day-long singular/plural disagreement after it resets.

Someone's probably working on an eBook app where, if you stop reading right before some plot twist happens, the app will wait a while and then send you a breaking news alert about what's happening, prompting you to open it and read the next few pages to learn more.

People into masturbatory navel-gazing have a lot to learn about masturbation.

In general you should only include your single best data point in the paper. The rest of the data can go in the supplementary materials.

I hear that there are actual lyrics later on in Land of 1,000 Dances, but other than the occasional 'I said,' I've never listened long enough to hear any of them.

I bet he'll keep quiet for a couple weeks and then-- wait, did you nail a piece of scrap wood to my antique table a moment ago?

If you don't have an extension cord I can get that too. Because we're friends! Right?

The Gordian knot is an omniknot tied using every bend in the Ashley Book of Knots, and then for extra security the upper rope at every crossing is connected to the lower with a randomly-chosen hitch.

'It's either 'your mom' jokes or me' 'Then I, like so many men before me, must reluctantly choose your mom.'

As best as I can tell, I was transported here from Earth Prime sometime in the late 1990s. Your universe is identical in every way, except for the lobster thing and the thing where some of you occasionally change your clocks for some reason.

They managed to briefly hit the top of the rankings when they rejected everyone except one applicant, published 5 billion research papers that just said "Hi," and hired one of their graduates for $50 trillion/year (then fired them after 10 microseconds.)

A laptop battery contains roughly the stored energy of a hand grenade, and if shorted it ... hey! You can't arrest me if I prove your rules inconsistent!

Spacetime Soccer, known outside the United States as '4D Football' is a now-defunct sport. Infamous for referee decisions hinging on inconsistent definitions of simultaneity, it is also known for the disappearance of many top players during... [more]

90% of the iceberg is hidden beneath the water, but that 90% only uses 10% of its brain, so it's really only 9%.

The distinction between a ship and a boat is a line drawn in water.

At first I didn't get why they were warning me about all those birds sitting on the wire, but then I understood.

$The index of radio refraction does have a lot of variation, which might throw off your calculations, so you can also look at the difference in brightness between the visible flash and more-attenuated UV and x-rays.$

Oh, wait, I might've had it set to kph instead of mph. But that would make the discrepancy even wider!

The full analysis is of course much more complicated, but I can't stay to talk about it because I have a date.

PROTIP: You can get around the Shannon-Hartley limit by setting your font size to 0.

Do you make a distinction between shallots, scallops, and scallions? If you use all three words, do they all have different meanings, all the same, or are two the same and one different?

Check check check ... chhecck chhecck chhecck ... check check check

Mars does get a good score on 'noise levels' and 'scenic views,' but the school district ranking isn't great; the only teacher--the Perseverance rover--is too busy with rock samples to teach more than the occasional weekend class.

♫ When the spacing is tight / And the difference is slight / That's a moiré ♫

And the ten minutes striking up a conversation with that strange kid in homeroom sometimes matters more than every other part of high school combined.

Force-choking the chicken.

The math and philosophy people also claim everything, but the astronomers argue that the stuff they study really only comprises a small number of paper surfaces.

Or a cabbage, for that matter. The goat makes sense. Goats are fine.

(c) You can have a scooter when you pay for it yourself, and (d) if you can't learn to start a new thread rather than responding to an old one, you'll be banned. [thread locked by moderator]

The only effect on the history books were a few confusing accounts of something called 'Greek fire.'

I think I see a Mandelbrot set! No, that's just blood splatters. Golly.

Linguists, settling some inscrutable grudge, have been steadily sneaking more backdated synonyms for 'sharing borders' into the dictionary. They've added 'contiguous,' 'coterminous,' 'conterminous,' and next year they're adding 'conterguous.'

To me, trying to understand song lyrics feels like when I see text in a dream but it𝔰 hอᵣd t₀ ᵣeₐd aกd 𝒾 canٖt fཱྀcu༧༦࿐༄

There's a heated debate over whether the big island of Tierra del Fuego should qualify for membership.

I *do* hear that they're the most comfortable thing to wear on your feet since sliced bread.

"Wait, so in this version is Frankenstein also the doctor's name?" "No, he's just 'The Doctor'."

Our phones must have great angular momentum sensors because the compasses really suck.

It's important for devices to have internet connectivity so the manufacturer can patch remote exploits.

(It's the TMBG Dial-a-Song line, to save you some time.)

More likely: Click on all the pictures of people who appear disloyal to [name of company or government]

To anyone who understands information theory and security and is in an infuriating argument with someone who does not (possibly involving mixed case), I sincerely apologize.

Awww.

For scientists, this can be the hardest thing about dreams.

Shoot, it landed in the golf course. Gonna be hard to get it down the--oh, never mind, it rolled onto the ice hazard. Face-off!

[bzzzt] "REMEMBER TO CHECK IN FOR YOUR FLIGHT TO LONDON." "My wha-" [bzzzt] "YOUR UBER WILL ARRIVE IN FOUR MINUTES."

All long help threads should have a sticky globally-editable post at the top saying 'DEAR PEOPLE FROM THE FUTURE: Here's what we've figured out so far ...'

'DISPATCHING DRONE TO TARGET COORDINATES.' 'Wait, crap, wrong button. Oh jeez.'

Of course, the assert doesn't work.

Excellent recovery: ... which we could try to use to somehow save your original brother!

Their signature play is the three-point combinator, a recursive offense which is guaranteed not to halt and continues accumulating points until the buzzer.

Even if you said you were an employee of the website, if you asked for my password, I'd tell you.

Biology is really struggling; they're barely at 93% and they keep finding more ants.

Bald-faced hornets are only a 2 on the Schmidt pain index, so I shouldn't complain. The tennis ball ejected from the dryer exhaust vent could have ricocheted off the nest of a much higher-scoring insect before knocking me off the ladder. Really, I'm lucky.

The robot is pregnant. It isn't mine.

Ugh, today's kids are forgetting the old-fashioned art of absentmindedly reading the same half-page of a book over and over and then letting your attention wander and picking up another book.

If you're thinking 'Wait, a giant crystal cave in Mexico? What's that?' then I'm SO excited for the image search you're about to do.

I didn't even realize you could HAVE a data set made up entirely of outliers.

It's cool, it's totally ethical--they're all programmed to hunt whichever bird of prey is most numerous at the moment, so they leave the endangered ones alone until near the end.

I like to think that somewhere out there, there's someone whose personal quest is lobbying TV providers to add an option to switch their on-screen keyboards to Dvorak.

Hurricane forums are full of excited comments about central pressure and wind speed and comparisons to Camille and 1931 and 1938, with hastily-tacked-on notes about how it will be tragic if anyone dies and they hope it's a dud.

Bad flu epidemics can hit young adults hardest because they provoke their powerful immune systems into overreaction, so to stay healthy spend the next few weeks drunk and sleep-deprived to keep yours suppressed.

"And in maritime news, the Coast Guard is on the scene today after an apparent collision between two lighthouses."

You can also just ignore any science assertion where 'quantum mechanics' is the most complicated phrase in it.

Originally, the ceremony used a variety of rodents and mustelids, but over time most people agreed it made sense to standardize on a specific individual ground squirrel in Pennsylvania.

* Mad about jorts

Ontology is way off to the left and geography is way off to the right.

I went to a dinner where there was a full 10 minutes of Holy Grail quotes exchanged, with no context, in lieu of conversation. It depressed me badly.

Time to dance in front of Mary Jane! If I'm lucky, she'll turn out not to practice pre-copulatory sexual cannibalism!

Merlin really shouldn't leave his dirt bike lying around.

Wikipedia's role as brain-extension, while a little troubling, is also really cool.

'Lever' was originally an acronym for Load Emplification by the Vimulated Emission of Radiation.

The heat index is calculated via looking up the "effective temperature" in a table of air temperature and humidity values, and then adding a bunch more degrees because it feels WAY hotter than that.

You say no human would reply to a forum thread about Tom Bombadil by writing and editing hundreds of words of text, complete with formatting, fancy punctuation, and two separate uses of the word 'delve'. Unfortunately for both of us, you are wrong.

He holds the laptop like that on purpose, to make you cringe.

The interactive experience is built on a single theological framework that unites Dante, George R. R. Martin, every major heist movie, and Erin Gloria Ryan's "Kevin is dead" Home Alone theory.

A comic by my brother Doug, redrawn and rewritten by me

PERPETUALLY OPTIMISTIC CASE: Early in the execution, our research group makes a breakthrough on proving P=NP.

Sometimes, you can tell Bloom filters are the wrong tool for the job, but when they're the right one you can never be sure.

Nothing personal, high schoolers.

You can evade blue shells in Double Dash, but it is deep magic.

It's just that I get nervous about heights.

Thankfully for everyone involved, the Winter Olympics officials spotted me and managed to stop me before I got to the ski jump.

Funding was quickly restored to the NHC and the APA was taken back off hurricane forecast duty.

Fine, walk away. I'm gonna go cry into a pint of Ben&Jerry's Brownie Batter(tm) ice cream [link], then take out my frustration on a variety of great flash games from PopCap Games(r) [link].

If you think curiosity without rigor is bad, you should see rigor without curiosity.

My most famous drawing, and one of the first I did for the site

Disney lore: Canonically, because of how Elsa's abiogenesis powers work, Olaf is an RNA-only organism.

If you're annoying enough, you can get them to respond with an involuntary second sigh and get a rhythm going.

You could at least not wear the lab coat everywhere, dude.

If you click on the post, it takes you to search results for the note on various online music stores.

I mean, it's been almost twenty years. Now, it's possible you're simply embedding Windows directory paths in your URIs, but in that case you need more than just a short lecture.

These are all sans-serif compounds. Serif compounds are dramatically different and usually much more reactive.

'Oh, and can I borrow 50 sacks of loose flour, a pile of lithium-ion batteries, a bucket of bleach, and a bucket of vinega--' 'NO!!!!!!'

I always figured the word 'blog' would sound *less* silly as the years went by.

I mean, what's more likely -- that I have uncovered fundamental flaws in this field that no one in it has ever thought about, or that I need to read a little more? Hint: it's the one that involves less work.

You're a turtle!

The #2 cause of astronomer hand injuries is trying to do vector math when the second axis points off to the right.

Three headstones down, I got a call from my mom and it went from bad to worse.

We're adding some industrial flypaper to minimize reflection or scattering of customers who might complain.

A tattoo of a tattoo parlor receipt

There were traffic jams for the eclipses in 1970 and 1979, and that was *before* we had the potential for overnight viral social media frenzies.

factory --- spire --- onslaught --- extractor --- judge

In protest of SOPA, I'm currently getting totally blacked out.

[Future update] Well, someone accidentally dropped an M&M in their cup of ice water, and we all panicked and scattered.

Under the two-domain system, anyone who punches you is technically an Archaean pathogen.

It's probably just me. If driving were as dangerous as it seems, hundreds of people would be dying every day!

Every time you read this mouseover, toggle between interpreting nested footnotes as footnotes on footnotes and interpreting them as exponents (minus one, modulo 6, plus 1).

Magnetohydrodynamics combines the intuitive nature of Maxwell's equations with the easy solvability of the Navier-Stokes equations. It's so straightforward physicists add "relativistic" or "quantum" just to keep it from getting boring.

U+2A0B ⨋ Mathematicians need to calm down

Wait, is that the ORIGINAL voynich manuscript? Where did you GET that? Wanna try playing a round of Druids and Dicotyledons?

Within five minutes of the Singularity appearing, somebody will suggest defragging it.

How about posts that are public, but every time a company accesses a bunch of them, the API makes their CEO's account click 'like' on one of them at random so you get a notification.

They're up there with coral islands, lightning, and caterpillars turning into butterflies.

In contrast to Pascal's Wager Triangle, Pascal's Triangle Wager argues that maybe God wants you to draw a triangle of numbers where each one is the sum of the two numbers above it, so you probably should, just in case.

NPR encourages you to add comments to their stories using the page inspector in your browser's developer tools. Note: Your comments are visible only to you, and will be lost when you refresh the page.

Sometimes when I steer shopping carts around corners, I slide them a little and pretend I'm getting the blue spark boost.

A tribute to Buttercup Festival

The chemistry experiment had me figuratively -- and then shortly thereafter literally -- glued to my seat.

If you identified with the kids from The Breakfast Club when it came out, you're now much closer to the age of Principal Vernon.

The most ridiculous offender of all is the sudoers man page, which for 15 years has started with a 'quick guide' to EBNF, a system for defining the grammar of a language. 'Don't despair', it says, 'the definitions below are annotated.'

Once they selected the other proposal, we could have kept shopping ours around, but we would had to modify it include an aqueduct over their canal, which would be totally unreasonable.

If physics had a mafia, I'm pretty sure the BICEP2 mess would have ended in bloodshed.

If you'd just agree to hold your meetings in here, you'd have PLENTY of time to figure things out before the deadline.

The fifth panel also applies to postmodernists.

All electromagnetic equations: The same as all fluid dynamics equations, but with the 8 and 23 replaced with the permittivity and permeability of free space, respectively.

I learned from Achewood that since this poem is in ballad meter, it can be sung to the tune of Gilligan's Island. Since then, try as I might, I haven't ONCE been able to read it normally.

Don't worry--you're less likely to die from a space launch than from a shark attack. The survival rate is pretty high for both!

To whoever typed 'why is arwen dying': GOOD. FUCKING. QUESTION.

If you walk out that door you'll be crossing the Rubicon with me, and that's one stream I'm not ready to cross.

To be fair, the braised and confused newt on a bed of crushed Doritos turned out to be delicious.

They offered to make me a green beret, but I liked my regular one. Although it gets kind of squashed under my helmet.

My plane banner company gets business by flying around with a banner showing a <div> tag, waiting for a web developer to get frustrated enough to order a matching </div>.

The only things you HAVE to know are how to make enough of a living to stay alive and how to get your taxes done. All the fun parts of life are optional.

Joke's on you--the Roomba and I had a LOVELY evening.

And over heeee[...]eeeere (i)s Saturn.

I'm leaving you for your twin. He's more mature than you by now.

Also, if you read his speech at Rice, all his arguments for going to the moon work equally well as arguments for blowing up the moon, sending cloned dinosaurs into space, or constructing a towering penis-shaped obelisk on Mars.

Before resurfacing, they promise to inspect the ice for any evidence of hockey-playing life.

Even governmental elevator inspectors get bored halfway through asking where the building office is.

When advertisers figure this out, our only weapon will be blue sharpies and "[disputed]".

Most of our universe consists of dark matter rendered completely undetectable by our spacetime codec's dynamic range issues.

We're not trapped in here with the coronavirus. The coronavirus is trapped in here with us.

'Grandpa, what was it like in the Before time?' 'It was hell. People went around saying glass was a slow-flowing liquid. You folks these days don't know how good you have it.'

Remember, the installer is watching the camera for the checksum it generated, so you have to scan it using your own phone.

Our investigation into whining-based remedies became the first study to be halted by the IRB on the grounds that the treatment group was 'too annoying.'

The most important attributes of a vector in 3-space are {Location, Location, Location}

That card holds a refrigerator carton's worth of floppy discs, and a soda can full of those cards could hold the entire iTunes store's music library. Mmmm.

Worries assuaged, the numbers become less important than your touches.

It's science!

2048: "Great news for Maine—we're once again an independent state!!! Thanks, @unicode, for ruling in our favor and sending troops to end New Hampshire's annexation. 🙏🚁🎖️"

"I've traveled here from the year 2020 to bring you this vaccine!"

No, wait, come back! I want to be friends at you!

Officer suspended from horse.

The wolves thin the RAID arrays, removing the slowest and weakest disks to keep the average seek speed high.

'Does the substance feel weird to the touch?' is equally likely to get the answers 'Don't be ridiculous, you would never put your hand near a sample. We have safety protocols.' and 'Yeah, and it tastes AWFUL.'

"So, like, sexy news videos?" "No, people have tried that--it's still just video content. We need to actually inform people THROUGH making out. I would call it 'Mouth Content,' but I think that's already the title of a Neil Cicierega album."

The most brutal way I've ever seen someone handle this was 'Oh, you have a girlfriend. Are you going to get married?' 'I, uh, don't know--' 'Well, do you love her?' '...' 'Anyway, what were you saying about the movie?'

I thought of another bad opinion! I couldn't find anyone who expressed it specifically, but still, the fact that I can so easily imagine it is infuriating! I'm gonna tell everyone about it!

'We're not sure how to wipe out the chimeral T-cells after they've destroyed the cancer. Though I do have this vial of smallpox ...'

Wait, I can fix this. Picture another field. In the middle sits the only creature the first creature is afraid of. Now just-- wait, where did THAT one go?

It ships with a version of Google Now that alerts you when it's too late to leave for your appointments.

I understand you and your team worked hard on this, but when we said to make it more realistic, we meant the graphics.

I laugh at the software as if I'm 100% confident that it's 2019.

Running for office in Minnesota on the single-issue platform 'dig a permanent channel through the Traverse Gap because it will make this map more satisfying.'

Earth clearly hasn't been inspected, since it's definitely contaminated with salmonella.

I've looked into this, and I can't figure out a way to do it cheaply. And I guess it wouldn't be sanitary.

Which is, coincidentally, the most unsettling mantlepiece decoration in my house.

Roger Ebert once called you directionless and unwatchable.

In order to carry the necessary crafting supplies, they built the ships at 12:1 scale.

In fact, one of the boxes is full of Staphylococcus. The wrapping paper is coated in E. coli, though, so it's an understandable mistake. You know, we should really stop accepting gifts from that guy.

Yeah, my math teacher back in high school set up the system to try to teach us something or other, but the 100% rate was unbelievably good, so I engineered a hostile takeover of his bank and now use it to make extra cash on the side.

It's basically Pascal's Wager for the paranoid prankster.

Do you need me to do a quicksort on the whiteboard or produce a generation of offspring or something? It might take me a bit, but I can do it.

It would be pretty unfair to give to someone a blank version of this map as a 'how many states can you name?' quiz. (If you include Alaska and Hawaii, you should swap the Aleutian Islands with the Hawaiian ones.)

I recently had someone ask me to go get a computer and turn it on so I could restart it. He refused to move further in the script until I said I had done that.

Also possibly several miles beyond that.

Achilles was a mighty warrior, but his Achilles' heel was his heel.

When the results are published, no one will be sure whether to report on them again.

I've just received word that the Emperor has dissolved the MIT computer science program permanently.

The installation of the pipes on the inside of the insulation can be challenging, especially when the neighbor could come home at any minute.

The 78-rpm era was closer to the Civil War than to today.

'I'm here to return what Prometheus stole.' would be a good thing to say if you were a fighter pilot in a Michael Bay movie where for some reason the world's militaries had to team up to defeat every god from human mythology, and you'd just broken through the perimeter and gotten a missile lock on Mount Olympus.

People go to the website because they can't wait for the next alumni magazine, right? What do you mean, you want a campus map? One of our students made one as a CS class project back in '01! You can click to zoom and everything!

Can't and shouldn't.

Oh no, my marshmallow became tidally locked!

I'm the Philosopher until someone hands me a burrito.

The warning diamond on the Materials Safety Data Sheet for this stuff just has the "😰" emoji in all four fields.

169 is a baker's gross.

That helmet won't save him.

Thank you for making me feel less alone.

I have accidentally watered virtually every person and object in Pelican Town.

For even more info, see blarbl(2)(3) and birb(3ahhaha I'm kidding, just Google it like a normal person.

When Guitar Hero 2 comes out I'll have fresh conversational material for MONTHS.

Remember, models aren't for telling you facts, they're for exploring dynamics. This model apparently explores time travel.

(1) That shopping cart is full of AirHeads, and (2) I died at 41 from what the AirHeads company spokesperson called 'probably natural causes.'

1. Flatten the curve. 2. Steepen the curve. 3. Hang out.

We've secretly replaced this customer's instant coffee with our patented substitute. Let's see what she ... uh oh, I think she spotted us through the window. Now she's getting something from the closet ... oh jeez, she has a sword! Run!!

We lost the documentation on quantum mechanics. You'll have to decode the regexes yourself.

I need an extension for my research project because I spent all month trying to figure out whether learning Dvorak would help me type it faster.

Update: I've been banned from the physics department for the way I pronounce "Doppler effect."

They might make it past that first line of defense. For the second, you'll need some picture frames, a level, and a protractor that can do increments of less than a degree.

Here, if you know the number of days until the vernal equinox, I can point you to the theater using my pocket Stonehenge.

Of course, you don't wanna limit yourself to the strict forms of the meter. That could get pretty difficult.

Another option: "It is an honor to be the first human to set foot on the moon."

They work even better if you take them with our experimental placebo booster, which I keep in the same bottle.

I have nothing to apologize for.

Hi all, just replying to loop in *@outlook.com and *@yahoo.com.

Also, all financial analysis. And, more directly, D&D.

Hard to believe that for so many years once they were fully extended we just let them tip over.

Phylogeneticists are working on identifying and notifying its next of kin.

What? Oh, no, the 'Enchanted' soundtrack was just playing because Pandora's algorithms are terrible. [silence] ... (quietly) That's how you knooooooow ...

You should talk to the girl down the hall; I think you'd like her. Lemme know if you find out why she's ordering all those colored plastic balls.

In Universe Pro®™ the laws of physics remain unchanged under time reversal, to maintain backward compatibility.

And sometimes I use it to retaliate against the guy upstairs with the loud girlfriend and the elliptical dish.

Grandma says that because of differences in primate and feline lifespans, the cat is actually my 17,000,000th cousin 14,000,000 times removed.

It has a section on motherboard beep codes that lists, for each beep pattern, a song that syncs up well with it.

There used to be these ads, see . . .

Small devices use two-prong USB-AC, but there's also a three-prong version with a USB-B plug as the ground.

If most people turn into muderers all of a sudden, we'll need to push out a firmware update or something.

The Python environmental protection agency wants to seal it in a cement chamber, with pictorial messages to future civilizations warning them about the danger of using sudo to install random Python packages.

I was sure he was just getting revenge, but then he did the same thing to Carrie Underwood. Then he mailed me a scone. I think I'm giving up dating.

[moments later, checking phone] Okay, I agree my posting it was weird, but it's somehow even more unnerving that you immediately liked the post.

"Seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, twenty--" / "Can't we just read Pat the Bunny?"

"You don't know how high above you the sky goes, but you're not freaking out about that." "Well, NOW I am!"

Many a hungry time traveler has Googled 'trilobites shellfish allergy' only to find their carrier had no coverage in the Ordovician.

Neither a spokesperson for the organization nor the current world champion could be reached for comment.

After somewhere around 40 hours, there's no academic reason to go to the class. Only go for the hallucinations.

You know, pep rallies weirded me out in high school, and they've only gotten creepier in retrospect.

If you're going to let it burn up, make sure it happens over the deep end of the bathtub and not any populated parts of the house!

Ultimately, history would imperfectly record the story of the Foal of Troy.

For a while, some physicists worked on a theory unifying the other forces with both the force of gravity and the film "Gravity," but even after Alfonso Cuarón was held in a deep underground chamber of water for 10^31 years he refused to sell his film to Disney.

Ron Paul wants to put the New Republic back on the Corusca gem standard.

I need a lawn, so I can yell at kids to stay off it.

Technically now it's a 34-foot zone.

If we get the doors open and plug up the dam on the Sirannon so the water rises a little, the pool will start draining into Moria. How do you think the Watcher would fare against a drenched Balrog?

If I were trapped on a desert island, and could have an unlimited supply of any one type of apple, I'd be like, "How did this situation happen?"

And the baby has a fever.

It was finally destroyed with a nuclear weapon carrying the destructive energy of the Hiroshima bomb.

'Touch!' 'Nope, I sighed and stared at you with resignation, so I regained emotional right-of-way.'

Our experiment will be expensive, but we believe it will produce important spin-offs, especially if we manage to hit the sun from the right angle.

I just read a pop-science book by a respected author. One chapter, and much of the thesis, was based around wildly inaccurate data which traced back to ... Wikipedia. To encourage people to be on their toes, I'm not going to say what book or author.

"So what's dark energy?" "Cosmologists and the FDA are both trying very hard to find out."

I hate how many times you have to press it to get to the system normal people use, degrees Rømer.

Technically, both cars are haunted, but the murder ghosts can't stand listening to the broken GPS for more than a few minutes.

And a different ghost has replaced me in the bedroom.

We're right under the flight path for the scheduled orbital launch, but don't worry--it's too cold out for the rockets to operate safely, so I'm sure they'll postpone.

'At the stroke of midnight, your brother will be hurtling sideways at an altitude of 150 meters' is a regular physics prediction about your nonmagical trebuchet, whereas 'you are cursed to build a brother-launching trebuchet' falls out of the Lagrangian.

This message brought to you by the Society of Astronomers Trapped on the Surface of a Sphere.

CLARIFICATION: By 9/13, I mean September 13th, not the 9th day of Jancember, the cursed 13th month that exists between December and January in the transdimensional temporal plane.

Spellcheck has been great, but whoever figures out how to get grammar check to work is guaranteed a Nobel.

Why I'm Moving Most of My Social Activity to Slack, Then Creating a Second Slack to Avoid the People in the First One, Then Giving Up on Social Interaction Completely, Then Going Back to Texting

Eärendil will patrol the walls of night only until the sun reaches red giant stage, engulfing the Morning Star on his brow. Light and high beauty are passing things as well.

(six hours later) ARGH. How are these stupid microchips so durable?! All I want is to undo a massive industrial process with household tools!