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

Despite it being imaginary, I already have SUCH a strong opinion on the cord-switch firing incident.

Although now people will realize three-per-em space that all this time I've been using weird medium mathematical space whitespace characters in my hair space hair space hair space speech dot dot dot...

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.

Every downhill walk is a waterslide that might have been.

After changing it back and forth several times and consulting with internet linguist Gretchen McCulloch, I settled on "ok" in my book How To, but I'm still on the fence. Maybe I should just switch to "oK."

I know it seems unpleasant, but of the two ways we typically transfer them, I promise this is the one you want.

But Einstein said it was the most powerful force in the universe, and I take all my investment advice from flippant remarks by theoretical physicists making small talk at parties.

[They do not move.]

Frazzled scientists are requesting that everyone please stop generating hypotheses for a little bit while they work through the backlog.

My pet theory is that in real life, the kid at the beginning of Jurassic Park who made fun of the 'six-foot turkey' never got a talking-to from Dr. Grant, and grew up to produce several of the movie's sequels.

When I was looking at the box, I should have thought more about what "360 degrees of freedom" meant.

Having a positive attitude is almost tautologically good for your mental health, and extreme stress can hurt your immune system, but that doesn't mean you should feel like shit for feeling like shit.

I guess I should be signing stuff, but I've never been sure what to sign. Maybe if I post my private key, I can crowdsource my decisions about what to sign.

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.

Some people haven't heard of the Donner Party. They were pioneers who got stranded and likely resorted to cannibalism.

Ugh, and we JUST went through this yesterday with javelin.

Dr. Petroff has also shown that the Higgs boson signal was actually sparks from someone microwaving grapes, the EHT black hole photo was a frozen bagel someone left in too long, and the LIGO detection was just someone slamming the microwave door too hard.

I THINK EVERYONE INVOLVED HERE IS CUTE.

When speaking out loud, you can can call it the 'Perseids meatier shower' and no one will ever know. (If you do get caught somehow, just tell them to Google the 'Kentucky meat shower' and that will distract them while you escape.)

Deep in some corner of my heart, I suspect that real times tables are wrong about 6x7=42 and 8x7=56.

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

Star Trek V is a small part of the space frontier, but it's been a while since that movie came out so I assume we've finished exploring it by now.

The wars between the "OTHER PRIMATES OPEN THEM FROM THE SMALL END" faction versus the "BUT THE LITTLE BIT OF BANANA AT THE SMALL END IS GROSS" faction consumed Europe for generations.

The Hammer + Captain Tightpants == Captain Hammerpants?

I wish I'd missed you then so I wouldn't be missing you now

Or that I'm at least following the curve of the Earth around to land ...

There are two types of dichotomy: False dichotomies, true dichotomies, and surprise trichotomies.

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

The SLS head engineer plans to invite Shania Twain to stand under the completed prototype, then tell her, 'I don't expect you to date me just because I'm a rocket scientist, but you've gotta admit--this is pretty fucking impressive.'

They tried to report me to the authorities, but because I had the device they couldn't charge me.

Hang on, we got a call from the feds. They say we can do whatever with him, but the EPA doesn't want that laptop in the ocean. They're sending a team.

Just pretend you're kidding.

The strongest incentive we have to develop faster-than-light travel is that it would let us apologize in advance.

You know that 'sweep the pieces off the board and see it in your mind' thing? Doesn't work.

It started as a mistake that everyone was afraid to admit to, and then it stuck because removing it 'looks silly.'.

NO DRAMA ZONE -> If I've made you sad, you'd better not tell me, because I am TERRIFIED of that situation and have NO IDEA how to handle it.

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

It's frustrating to calibrate your precautions when there's only one kind of really definitive feedback you can get, you can only get it once, and when you do it's too late.

Ok, I've got it, just need to plug in my security key. Hmm, which way does the USB go? Nope, not that way. I'll just flip it and– OH JEEZ IT FELL INTO THE VENT.

I dropped my phone while trying to search, and I tried to unlock it from up here, so can you also search for screen repair places?

Doing great here in the sixth and hopefully final year of the 2016 election.

For some reason, my childhood suspension of disbelief had no problem with the fact that this ancient galaxy is full of humans, but was derailed by language. There's no Asia OR Europe there, so where'd they get all the Indo-European roots?

Manage cookies related to essential site functions, such as keeping Atrus and his sons imprisoned within the page.

If only we'd chosen 1944-12-02 08:45:52 as the Unix epoch, we could've combined two doomsday scenarios into one and added a really boring scene to that Roland Emmerich movie.

$We didn't even get to the continued fractions!$

I'm like a vampire, except I'm not crossing that threshold even if you invite me.

Tonight's top story: Lucifer, the Prince of Darkness, died in his home this morning at the age of [unintelligible rune]. Due to the large number of sharks inhabiting his former kingdom, no body could be recovered.

I never trust anyone who's more excited about success than about doing the thing they want to be successful at.

One good trick, if you get called on a fake service, is to build a working version of it and mention it again the next week.

She won the first half of all our chemo Scrabble games, but then her IV drugs started kicking in and I *dominated*.

This works on pretty much every level.

If we can get a brood of 13-year cicadas going, we might have a chance at making this happen before the oceans evaporate under the expanding sun.

My country's World Cup win was exciting and all, but c'mon, what if the players wore nylon wings and COULD LITERALLY FLY?

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.

'If you're done being pedantic, we should get dinner.' 'You did it again!' 'No, I didn't.'

At least I never gave her the root password.

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?

Family going to bed at 10 PM is so much worse than jet lag.

Can you stop glaring at me like that? It makes me feel really ironic.

It comes with a certificate of authenticity, which comes with a certificate of authenticity, which comes with a...

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

Excited to vote for future presidents Bill Eisenhamper, Amy Forb, Ethan Obample, and Abigail Washingtoast.

I don't understand the things you do, and you therefore may represent an interaction with the quantum vacuum virtual plasma.

I was there, dude.

The high I feel when I actually remember to bring my reusable bags to the store--and take them inside rather than leaving them in the parked car--can last for days.

I actually kind of feel like John and Surf King wouldn't like each other, which is a lot to unpack.

Blade Runner: Classic, but incredibly slow.

I take it Narnia doesn't have Cinnabons? Because if you can magic up a plate of those, I'll betray whoever.

'They really shouldn't let those small cars drive in traffic. I worry I'm going to kill someone if I hit one! They should have to drive on the sidewalk, safely out of the way.'

'Dude, why can't you just be a normal roommate?' 'Because I'm coming TOWARD you!'

A few minutes later, the goat from behind door C drives away in the car.

I can't remember where I heard this, but someone once said that defending a position by citing free speech is sort of the ultimate concession; you're saying that the most compelling thing you can say for your position is that it's not literally illegal to express.

Fun fact: The standard North American NAD83 coordinate system is misaligned from the actual Earth, off-center by about 7 feet. Someone knows where I am, and I'm in the wrong place.

Also, I apologize for the time I climbed down into your world and everyone freaked out about the lesbian orgy overseen by a priest.

Remember, meteors always hit the tallest object around.

Spherical or parabolic reflectors would of course lead to aberrant behavior.

I think I could spend hours just stepping on and off of conveyor belts moving at various speeds.

Or the pressure at the Earth's core will rise slightly.

We've almost finished constructing the piña collider.

Not actual size, except technically at one spot near the left.

Not even metapneumovirus, easily the common cold virus with the coolest name, warrants our sympathy. Colds suck. No mercy.

This isn't an informational illustration; this is a thing I think we should do. First, we'll need a gigantic spool of thread. Next, we'll need some kind of ... hmm, time to head to Seattle.

The vaccine stuff seems pretty simple. But if you take a closer look at the data, it's still simple, but bigger. And slightly blurry. Might need reading glasses.

If you get your hands on that one, it's the worst place to have a breaking-up conversation.

Type IIII error: Mistaking tally marks for Roman numerals

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

Asimov's Cosmic AC was created by linking all datacenters through hyperspace, which explains a lot. It didn't reverse entropy--it just discarded the universe when it reached end-of-life and ordered a new one.

Hi, I'm your new meteorologist and a former software developer. Hey, when we say 12pm, does that mean the hour from 12pm to 1pm, or the hour centered on 12pm? Or is it a snapshot at 12:00 exactly? Because our 24-hour forecast has midnight at both ends, and I'm worried we have an off-by-one error.

OCEAN PLAY AREA RULES: No running, no horseplay, no megatsunamis, and no trying to pry the wreck of the Titanic off the bottom.

169 is a baker's gross.

SUGGESTIONS FOR FUTURE RESEARCH: No further research is needed as it is frankly none of our business.

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.

More generally, with great power comes great dEnergy/dt.

It's depressing how many of these are real shirts

"I [suspect] that we are throwing more and more of our resources, including the cream of our youth, into financial activities remote from the production of goods and services, into activities that generate high private rewards disproportionate to their social productivity. I suspect that the immense power of the computer is being harnessed to this 'paper economy', not to do the same transactions more economically but to balloon the quantity and variety of financial exchanges." --James Tobin, July 1984

We've gotten him up to 20% milk and cookies through an aggressive public campaign, but that seems to be his dietary limit. Anything above that and he starts developing nutritional deficiencies.

Maybe we're all gonna die, but we're gonna die in *really cool ways*.

I firmly believe that nothing can go wrong on a project if you're wearing one of those wrist things.

No, of course we don't microwave the mug WITH the teabag in it. We microwave the teabag separately.

I mean, half of these are undefined. And your multiplication dots are too low; they look like decimal points.

Adding data for South Korea but with their cases scaled to match the population of Japan and the land area of Australia, and vice versa.

I believe the truth always lies halfway between the most extreme claims.

I wanna hold your hand so I don't fall out of your gyrocopter.

'The world's greatest [whatever]' is subjective, but 'One of the world's greatest [whatever]s' is clearly objective. Anyway, that's why I got you this 'one of the world's greatest moms' mug!

"Isn't the original Jurassic Park your favorite movie of all time?" "Yes, but that's because I like dinosaurs and I WANT there to be an island full of them. If John Hammond's lab had been breeding serial killers in creepy masks, I wouldn't have watched!" "Wait, are you sure? That could actually be good." "Ok, I WOULD watch the scenes where Jeff Goldblum tries to convince a bunch of executives that the park is a bad idea."

Anna Karenina is a happy family lumper and unhappy family splitter.

How could anyone consider themselves a well-rounded adult without a basic understanding of silicate geochemistry? Silicates are everywhere! It's hard to throw a rock without throwing one!

The Hubble length is about 1.9 meters lying down; Edwin Hubble was a tall guy.

Do I get to remove letters entirely? Or just rearrange them? Because the 'k/c' situation is ridiculous. Look, we can make out whenever. This is *immortality*!

Chomskyists, generative linguists, and Ryan North, your days are numbered.

Charsets even used to be known as 'alpha-bets' before that word's obvious negative associations caused it to die out.

The AYB retro-return-date (Zero Wing Zero Hour) should be around AD 2021.

Good point--making no decision is itself a decision. So that's a THIRD option I have to research!

During the week, I research my character by living in his house and raising his children.

And it doesn't pop up a box every time asking you to use your real name. In fact, there's no way to set your name at all. You just have to keep reminding people who you are.

Fortunately, exactly zero other annoying internet behaviors have developed during this time.

And the heaven departed as a scroll when it is rolled together, but then more heaven kept appearing to replace it, as if the scroll was infinite.

I lead a small but extraordinarily persuasive religion whose only members are door-to-door proselytizers from other faiths.

They could say "the connection is probably lost," but it's more fun to do naive time-averaging to give you hope that if you wait around for 1,163 hours, it will finally finish.

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?'.

I'm currently in the I Have Cheese phase of this cycle.

Unlike an Iron Age collapse, a Bronze Age collapse releases energy, since copper and tin are past the iron peak on the curve of binding energy.

Especially you mouseover-text readers. You're the best. <3

Although it was a setback for physics, I'm glad the particle naming rights issue led to the cancelation of Pizza Hut's Superconducting Super Collider in the early 90s, so the Double Stuffed Extra Cheese Topping Quark ended up just being named 'top quark.'

My bracket has 76 trombones led by John Philip Sousa facing off against thousands of emperor penguins led by Morgan Freeman.

I remember the exact moment in my childhood when I realized, while reading a flyer, that nobody would ever spend money solely to tell me they wanted to give me something for nothing. It's a much more vivid memory than the (related) parental Santa talk.

The ideal mix for maximum competitive cable-coiling energy is one A/V tech, one rock climber, one sailor, and one topologist.

A term coined by my friend Beth

I don't want to talk about it

Sadly, this is a true story. At least I learned about the OS X 'say' command.

I love the title-text!

On the other hand, it took us embarrassingly long to clue in to the lung cancer/cigarette thing, so I guess the real lesson is "figuring out which ideas are true is hard."

I mean, we already live in a world of flying robots killing people. I don't worry about how powerful the machines are, I worry about who the machines give power to.

The test didn't (spoiler alert) destroy the world, but the fact that they were even doing those calculations makes theirs the coolest jobs ever.

this calculator implements the simple throwing distance estimation model from the how to throw things chapter of the book how to

I liked the idea, suggested by h00k on bash.org, of a Twitter bot that messages prominent politicians to tell them when they've unnecessarily used sms-speak abbreviations despite having plenty of characters left.

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

I think the IETF hit the right balance with the 128 bits thing. We can fit MAC addresses in a /64 subnet, and the nanobots will only be able to devour half the planet.

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

It's not my fault I haven't had a chance to measure the curvature of this particular universe.

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.

Cracked.com is another inexplicable browser narcotic. They could write a list of '17 worst haircuts in the Ottoman Empire' and I'd read through to the end, then click on all the links at the end.

Of the two Garfields, you wouldn't think the cat would turn out to be the more compelling presidential speechwriter, but there you go.

At least they're not alone down there.

Luckily for my interpretation, no precincts were won by the Green Party.

I sort of wish my texting app showed the percentage next to each person, but also sort of don't want to know.

Chuck Jones is a vengeful god.

They all made fun of Autometalogolex, but someday there will be a problem with Christmas that can only be solved if Santa somehow gets a serious headache, and then they'll see.

That's actually the original Japanese version of A Million Random Digits, which is much better than the American remake the book was based on.

SOUND DOGS MAKE: [BARKING] [HISSING] [LIGHTSABER NOISES] [FLUENT ENGLISH] [SWEARING]

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

You can identify them ahead-of-time -- they lead with their left foot when the music starts.

100 years later, this story remains terrifying--not because it's the local network block, but because the killer is still on IPv4.

Copy of Copy of Copy of Copy of Copy of Copy of Copy of Copy of Copy of Copy of Copy of Copy of Copy of Copy of Copy of Copy of Copy of Copy of Copy of Copy of Copy of Copy of Copy of Copy of Copy of Copy of Copy of Copy of Copy of Copy of Copy of Copy of Copy of Untitled.doc

If I developed a hue-shifting metamaterial, I would photobomb people's Instagram pics with a sheet of material that precisely undid the filter they were using.

Plus, time's all weird in there, so most of it probably broke down and decomposed hundreds of years ago. Which reminds me, I've been meaning to get in touch with Yucca Mountain to see if they're interested in a partnership.

We don't sell products; we sell the marketplace. And by 'sell the marketplace' we mean 'play shooters, sometimes for upwards of 20 hours straight.'

I've always wondered whether you could drink slowly enough, and eliminate fast enough, that you just sort of peed continuously. But I'm afraid to try because I worry someone might call while I'm doing it and ask what I'm up to, and I won't be able to think of a lie.

Psychology researchers say our 'flashbulb' memories of big events can be unreliable, but I clearly remember watching live on CNN as Challenger crashed into and destroyed the Berlin Wall.

Wait, damn, I think I spotted a new email on the last refresh.

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

She's so fat the attraction goes up as the CUBE of the distance instead of the square

I'm the proud parent of an honor student, and the person driving me is proud, too!

My password is just every Unicode codepoint concatenated into a single UTF-8 string.

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

Although grad students, suddenly reminded that food exists, tend to just grab and devour both without further discussion.

SUB[59]: The submission numbers for my accepted OEIS submissions in chronological order

Luckily, the damages were partly offset by the prize money we got from accidentally winning the nearby water skiing championship tournament.

Who can forget the early 2010s memes? 'You know you're a 90s kid if you remember the feeling of warm sunlight on your face.' 'Only 90s kids remember the dawn.'

The 1919 Great Boston Molasses Flood remained the deadliest confectionery containment accident until the Canadian Space Agency's 2031 orbital maple syrup delivery disaster.

I've been working my way through this 1950s podcast by someone named John Tolkien called 'Lord of the Rings'--it's a deep dive into this fictional world he created. Good stuff, really bingeable!

Over the years I've decided I'd rather have them on than not, but I'm glad there aren't "has opened a blank note to compose a reply to you" notifications.

As the 'exotic animals in homemade aprons hosting baking shows' YouTube craze reached its peak in March 2020, Andrew Cuomo announced he was replacing the Statue of Liberty with a bronze pangolin in a chef's hat.

Unfortunately, body size and bite force continue to increase.

When we take into account the recent discovery of previously-unstudied history in the 1750s, this year may have been an outright loss.

For the first time ever, the phrase 'I'd like to thank everyone at 4chan for making me successful and happy' is uttered.

Ok, plan B: Fly a kite into the blades, with a rock in a sling dangling below it, and create the world's largest trebuchet.

Frankly, I see no difference between thee and a summer's day. Only Ron Paul offers a TRUE alternative!

The US uses hollowed-out salt domes to store the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, and non-hollowed-out ones to store the Strategic Salt Reserve.

Since buns range from crepuscular to nocturnal, it's recommended that you enable the scheduled "Do Not Disturb" mode on your phone to avoid being woken by alerts about Night Buns.

A left-handed sheet bend creates a much weaker connection, especially under moderate loads.

"Do you feel like the answer depends on whether you're currently in the hole, versus when you refer to the events later after you get out? Assuming you get out."

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

I mean, it wasn't exactly MY thesis. When the FAA came to shut down our observatory for using the telescope mirror to shine light at airplanes, I took a thesis and a bunch of doctorates from the supply cabinet on my way out.

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

The bug report was marked 'could not reproduce'.

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.

Of all the nations, the armies of the ununoctium-benders are probably the least intimidating. The xenon-benders come close, but their flickery signs are at least effective for propaganda.

Give a man a fish, or he will destroy the only existing vial of antidote.

For all we know, the odds are in our favor.

Edward Tufte's 'The Visual Display of Quantitative Information' is a fantastic book, and should be required reading for anyone in either the sciences or graphic design.

The TI-86 was bad enough. I don't know how I'd have gotten through high school if I'd had a laptop+wifi.

No matter how elaborately you fool yourself.

It says to cut the onions into 1/4" slices, but I'd better correct for length contraction.

When you talk about the job experience you'll give me, why do you pronounce 'job' with a long 'o'?

Our company can be your one-stop shop for decentralization.

Bonus strip: just read the rightmost panels straight down.

"How does the spring not run out almost immediately?" "We pull it back REALLY far."

My upcoming album, 'Linked List', has covers of 'The Purple People Eater', the Ninja Turtles theme, 'Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini', and the Power Rangers theme, with every song played to the tune of the next.

According to my mom, my first word was (looking up at the sky) 'Wow!'

There are probably children out there holding down spacebar to stay warm in the winter! YOUR UPDATE MURDERS CHILDREN.

We live in a world where there are actual fleets of robot assassins patrolling the skies. At some point there, we left the present and entered the future.

Of course, Penny Arcade has already mocked themselves for this. They don't care.

The best wedge issue is an actual wedge.

'Can't you just use the LHC you already built to find it again?' 'We MAY have disassembled it to build a death ray.' 'Just one, though.' 'Nothing you should worry about.' 'The death isn't even very serious.'

The reverse only works if the subject has a nervous twitch.

Fortunately, after a brief skirmish, I seem to have gained the upper hand in the battle against my internal organs, at least until they learn to read and find out the mean stuff I've said about them.

[shouted, from the field] 'Aunt Beast hit a pop fly to second! Dive for it, Mrs Whatsit!'

I'm sure you can find some suitable worldbuilding material if you scavenge through the archives.

Earth's r_jf is approximately 1.5 light-days, leading to general relativity's successful prediction that all the frogs in the Solar System should be found collected on the surface of the Earth.

Also, we have a fort out in the woods where we stashed that hooker's body.

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!

The new crowd is heavily shaped by this guy named Eric, who's basically the Paris Hilton of the amateur plastic crazy straw design world.

This is true. The lyrics are ridiculous.

'Meet hot young singles in your mom's basement today'? Man, screw you, GeoIP.

J.J. Thompson won a Nobel Prize for his work in electricity in gases, but was unfairly passed over for his "An atom is plum pudding, and plum pudding is MADE of atoms! Duuuuude." theory.

Since delays should get less likely closer to the launch, most astronomers in 2018 believed the expansion of the schedule was slowing, but by early 2020 new measurements indicated that it was actually accelerating.

It's been extra bad ever since my GPS got stuck on Phoebe Judge mode.

It's totally a reasonable modern analogue. Jefferson would have been all about crypto.

There are at least fourteen ways this could go badly (seventeen if that fork is a dangerous crossbreed.)

This was actually drawn years before Red Spiders

I hate how the media only ever uses the first part of this quote, stripping it of its important context.

I hate when people take photos of their meal instead of eating it, because there's nothing I love more than the sound of other people chewing.

I mean, I can barely hear myself complaining about Battlestar Galactica.

An old astronomer trick for distinguishing the Sun from other stars is to take multiple photos a few minutes apart and overlay them, making the Sun stand out due to its high proper motion.

'Pour one out for precipitation data integrity,' I say, solemnly upending the glass into the rain gauge.

Moments later, the White Witch rolls up and, confused, tries to tempt the probe with a firmware upgrade.

Some engineer out there has solved P=NP and it's locked up in an electric eggbeater calibration routine. For every 0x5f375a86 we learn about, there are thousands we never see.

Be careful—it's breeding season, and some of these can be *extremely* defensive of their nests.

"röntgen" and "rem" are 20th-century physics terms that mean "no trespassing."

Of course, factions immediately sprang up in favor of '~*~sTaR tReK iNtO dArKnEsS~*~', 'xX_StAr TrEk InTo DaRkNess_Xx', and 'Star Trek lnto Darkness' (that's a lowercase 'L').

The cola+Mentos trick is up there with corn starch+water (vibrating platter optional) in scientific coolness out of common kitchen supplies.

I first saw this problem on the Google Labs Aptitude Test. A professor and I filled a blackboard without getting anywhere. Have fun.

But the rules of writing are like magic spells. If you never acquire them, then not using them says nothing.

2031: Google defends the swiveling roof-mounted scanning electron microscopes on its Street View cars, saying they 'don't reveal anything that couldn't be seen by any pedestrian scanning your house with an electron microscope.'

It also works for anything you teach someone else to do. "Oh yeah, I trained a pair of neural nets, Emily and Kevin, to respond to support tickets."

"Confirmed, we have to scrub." "Ugh, okay. I'll get the bucket and sponge."

I love the idea here, though of course it's not a great-quality drawing or scan.

'Where were you when you learned you'd won?' 'I was actually asleep; I woke up when I refreshed the webite and saw the news.'

Who's calling me?? WHY IS THE WORST PERSON IN THE WORLD CALLING ME!?

It's crazy how much my gut opinion of a movie/song is swayed by what other people say, regardless of how I felt coming out of the theater.

A long time in the future, in a galaxy far, far, away, astronomers in the year 2008 sight an unusual gamma-ray burst originating from somewhere far across the universe.

Scary thought #138: Raptors coming down the waterslide behind me.

It's going to be weird near the end of May when the screen goes blank for over 18 hours.

You don't use science to show that you're right, you use science to become right.

I just came from The Martian, and I just have to say: Forget BB-8; I want a pet Sojourner! It's always been the cutest of our Mars rovers.

'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 wonder what the trendy adults in 2019 who are too cool for Pokemon will be into. Probably Digimon!

Hopefully the HVAC people set it to only affect the AIR in the room.

If anyone calls you on any weird detail, just say it's from the Jedi Prince book series, which contains so much random incongruous stuff that even most Expanded Universe/Legends fans collectively agreed to forget about it decades ago.

Nowadays the only ones left that do anything are turtles.

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

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

I wanted to make the world's fastest yawl, so I made the aft sail bigger, but apparently that means it's not a yawl anymore! It's a real ketch-22.

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

Maybe if I spin it back and forth really fast I can do some kind of pulse-width modulation.

Click to see a video of a modern bird using stability flapping during predatory behavior. It all fits! Also, apparently Microraptor had *four* wings? The past keeps getting cooler! (And there's more of it every day!)

Once he had the answer, Arrhenius complained to his friends that he'd "wasted over a full year" doing tedious calculations by hand about "so trifling a matter" as hypothetical CO2 concentrations in far-off eras (quoted in Crawford, 1997).

Just yesterday I bought my first non-DRM'd songs (The Last Vegas, in keeping with my 'I only listen to things from Guitar Hero' theme).

CVS's pharmacies are fine, but I much prefer their [censored]s.

If only my ancestors had been fortunate enough to marry into the branch of the bacteria family that could photosynthesize, like all my little green cousins here.

Protip: At midnight your excuse for not having read The Great Gatsby can switch from "I'm worried about violating copyright" to "I think my copy requires Flash."

Later: 'Why is there a book hovering over the trash can?'

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

I'm teaching every 8-year-old relative to say this, and every 14-year-old to do the same thing with Toy Story. Also, Pokemon hit the US over a decade ago and kids born after Aladdin came out will turn 18 next year.

It IS about physics. It ALL is.

I wonder what surviving human held the record before balloons (excluding edge cases like jumping gaps on a mountain bridge). Probably it was someone falling from a cliff into snow or water, but maybe it involved something weird like a gunpowder explosion or volcano.

This was always going to be a controversial Wirecutter post, but what really got them in trouble were their 'budget' and 'upgrade' picks.

The SpaceX system carefully guides falling phones down to the surface, a process which the phones increasingly often survive without exploding.

Ingress: Foursquare With Space Noises.

But instead of hitting the ocean, you should land in an overheating hot tub on a sinking cruise ship, sending it crashing through the floor into the burning engine room as the ship goes under.

A lot of Jedi romances start with this turning into a Lady and the Tramp spaghetti situation.

[As security is dragging me away] "Come on, at least I didn't make the mistake in the other direction!"

Don't be nervous about the robots, be nervous about the people with the resources to build them.

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

I'm compromising by picking a weird hill to lie on.

'All time machine systems nominal ... T-minus ten ... eleven ...'

'It has a ghost in it. Take it back.' 'No.'

My competitors say the tiny single tiny caster is unsafe, unstable, and offers no advantages over traditional designs, to which I say: wow, why are you guys so mean? I thought we were friends!

Astronomy (or "astrology" in British English) is the study of ...

They say it's probably safe to keep orbiting for a while, but if it stays on or starts flashing we might have to call someone.

If you encounter a hex bolt, but you only brought screwdrivers, you can try sandwiching the head of the bolt between two parallel screwdriver shafts, squeezing the screwdrivers together with a hand at either end, then twisting. It doesn't work and it's a great way to hurt yourself, but you can try it!

If at least one person has a nightmare about being swarmed by hundreds of mouse-sized dromaeosaurids, my work will have been done.

[scrolling through a giant spreadsheet of transcribed data] 'Wow, a surprising number of users grew up at 420 69th St.' 'Yeah, must be a high-rise or something.'

I am firmly of the opinion that if something doesn't have a year on it, every time the expiration date rolls around it is good again for the two weeks preceding that date.

I'm happy with my Kindle 2 so far, but if they cut off the free Wikipedia browsing, I plan to show up drunk on Jeff Bezos's lawn and refuse to leave.

My liege, we were able to follow the ship into Minkowski space, but now they've jumped to Hilbert space and they could honestly be anywhere.

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

There's a cool mental calculation hack I recently learned for this: If you open the calendar app on your phone or computer, the highest-numbered box along the bottom is equal to the number of days in the month!

For some reason the water in my pool is green and there's a weird film on the surface #nofilter

Ok, how many coins for a cinnamon roll?

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.

The only other person to walk by was a linguist back in the 80s, but she just spent a while dissecting the phrase 'help me down' before getting distracted by a squirrel and wandering off.

I'd like 0.4608 apples, please.

MY RESULTS ARE A SIGNIFICANT IMPROVEMENT ON THE STATE OF THE AAAAAAAAAAAART

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!

â€œIf you can read this, congratulationsâ€”the archive youâ€™re using still knows about the mouseover textâ€!

Once you've done this, make a note of how old they were. Then, when their age reaches double that, show them this chart again.

Oh God, the tornado picked up snakes!

While weather control is typically thought of as a superpower, the unconscious ability of astronomers and astrophotographers to summon clouds is more properly classified as a curse.

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

Oh, definitely not; they don't have Amazon Prime.

I think you could get up to about 11:59:57 before you'd have trouble swallowing the chocolates fast enough. At that point, you'd need some kind of a liquify-and-chug apparatus to get up over the 11:59:59 barrier. Anyway, Merry Christmas!

A lot of the highway department's budget goes to adjusting the sign whenever the moon passes directly overhead.

Remember to only adopt domesticated drones that specifically request it. It's illegal to collect wild ones under the Migratory Drone Treaty Act.

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

Two tips: 1) 8675309 is not just prime, it's a twin prime, and 2) if you ever find yourself raising log(anything)^e or taking the pi-th root of anything, set down the marker and back away from the whiteboard; something has gone horribly wrong.

Our models fall apart where the three theories overlap; we're unable to predict what happens when a nanometer-sized squirrel eats a grapefruit with the mass of the sun.

Life is too short for man pages, but occasionally much too short without them.

'This HAZMAT container contains radioactive material with activity of one becquerel.' 'So, like, a single banana slice?'

Every weekend I take an ATV out into the desert and spend a day tracing a faint "(C) GOOGLE 2009" watermark across the landscape.

Okay, now just as the loss hits him, slam on the brakes.

Markets have been rocked by a second day of uncertainty after someone set up a giant Ouija board on the NYSE wall controlled collectively by the movement of the stock tickers.

My Deep Impact/Little Prince crossover fanfic has been poorly received by the community.

The 'controlled demolition' theory was concocted by the government to distract us. '9/11 was an inside job' was an inside job!

What's even worse is, a month ago they transferred me to work on the game I was already playing, and suddenly I found myself procrastinating by playing the one I'd been assigned before. It's possible they're onto me and this is all part of the plan.

I looked up "insanity" in like 10 different dictionaries and none of them said anything like that. Neither did the DSM-4. But I'll keep looking. Maybe it's in the DSM-5!

This is how I explain computer problems to my cat. My cat usually seems happier than me.

It's like one teraspoon / when all you need is a kilonife

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

I'm staring at the "doctor" section, and I can't help but feel like I've forgotten someone.

For someone who has ostensibly outgrown staying up late waiting for Santa, I do spend an awful lot of time refreshing websites to see if packages are here yet.

In general, avoid exposure to any temperatures, pressures, particle energies, or states of matter that physicists think are neat.

On the other hand, physicists like to say physics is to math as sex is to masturbation.

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.

Ground-pole-ball-pole can be fun if you shake the first pole to get the second one whipping around dangerously, but the ball at the joint gets torn apart pretty fast.

At least there's a general understanding all around that Doctor Who is its own thing.

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.

This data is actually going into improving our self-driving car project, so hurry up--it's almost at the minefield.

Curdled milk, of a peculiar kind, made after a Bulgarian recipe and called "yaghurt," is now a Parisian fad and is believed to be a remedy against growing old. A correspondent who has tried it, says he would prefer to die young. (1905, The Elk Falls Journal)

Charles, I just talked to John and Mildred, who run that company selling seeds and nuts, and their kids with MOUTHS are starving!

With reasonable assumptions about latitude and body shape, how much time might she gain them? Note: whatever the answer, sunrise always comes too soon. (Also, is it worth it if she throws up?)

"While I try to do my part to destroy the environment, I try not to focus too much on individual responsibility. By pushing for broad policy changes, we can collectively do far more damage to the biosphere than any of us could on our own."

$GENERAL JAN DODONNA: An analysis of the plans provided by Princess Leia has reinvigorated the arguments of the 'artificial moonlet' and 'rogue planet-station' camps. I fear this question is fracturing the Rebellion.$

There was something about a cup and a sword and a tree and a green hill ...

At least, I don't think there's evidence. My claim that there's no evidence hasn't been falsified. At least, not that I know of.

It's okay, they scan the serial numbers and make sure you can't deposit the same bill more than once.

I pronounce epitome "EPPY-tome", but EpiPen "uh-PIE-pen".

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

Is he ALSO wondering at what point our thoughts diverged, if they even have yet? 'dude, I think he just took your credit card' AM I THE ORIGINAL? HOW DO I TELL?

Listen, I'm not a fan of the Spanish Inquisition OR predatory multi-level marketing schemes...

Brace yourself--the chirp gets pretty weird.

It's going in A collection of satellites skewered with pins and mounted in display boxes. Not necessarily MY collection.

I'm just trying to explain, please don't be jealous! Man, why are all my relationships ruined by early 90's rappers?

I also managed to improve the solution for n=1 to s<0.97, and with some upgrades I think I can hit 0.96.

It means shuffling quickly past nuns on the street with ketchup in your palms, pretending you're hiding stigmata.

The most delicious exotic fruit discovered this way is the strawberry banana. Sadly, it's only stable in puree form, so it's currently limited to yogurt and smoothies, but they're building a massive collider in Europe to search for a strawberry banana that can be eaten whole.

For the final exam, you take a screenshot showing off all the work you've done in the class, and it has to survive being uploaded, thumbnailed, and re-screenshotted through a chain of social media sites.

There are two rules on this ship: Never gaze back into the projection abyss, and never touch the red button labeled DYMAXION.

Kids are genetic experiments. We're just experimenting responsibly!

The worst part is when sidewalk cracks are out-of-sync with your natural stride.

The joke will be on him in a few weeks when animal control shows up and takes custody of his Roomba.

They're a little cagey about exactly where the crossover point lies relative to the likelihood of devastating effects on the planet.

Someday I hope to find a way to mess up a recipe so badly that it draws the attention of the International Air Transport Association, the International Mathematical Olympiad, or the NSA.

Merry Christmas from xkcd!

I don't trust mantle/core geologists because I suspect that, if they ever get a chance to peel away the Earth's crust, they'll do it in a heartbeat.

[five years later] Ok, it seems we were accidentally zoomed in slightly too far. But imagine there's a cool-looking twisted accretion disc just outside this black square!

One of the survivors, poking around in the ruins with the point of a spear, uncovers a singed photo of Richard Stallman. They stare in silence. "This," one of them finally says, "This is a man who BELIEVED in something."

Right now it's a bicycle wheel, so we've had to move to lighter vehicles, but the reduced overhead is worth it. There was one week when a wheel of cheese got dangerously close to the first page, though.

This xkcd.com update introduces a variety of new reading modes which can be activated through the menu below the comic.

"Off-by-one errors" isn't the easiest theme to build a party around, but I've seen worse.

And they choose Al Gore as Internet Secretary.

Maybe if I put it in a box for a while with a speaker playing some pleasant pastoral music, I can reprogram it.

'Come to what?' 'You. Me. This moment.'

Oh, what a pity, can't you understand . . .

There's a river flowing through the ocean

Shoot for the Moon. If you miss, you'll end up co-orbiting the Sun alongside Earth, living out your days alone in the void within sight of the lush, welcoming home you left behind.

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

I tried converting the prices into pizzas, to put it in more familiar terms, and it just became a hard-to-think-about number of pizzas.

Benthic Santas weren't even discovered until the 1970s, but many scientists now believe Christmas may have originally developed around hydrothermal vents and only later migrated to the surface.

Hourly haircuts would be annoying, but they'd be easier to do yourself, since you'd have adjacent hairs as a guide. Growing it out would be a huge pain, though.

An eternity later, the universe having turned out to have positive curvature and lots of mass, the boomerang hits him in the back of the head.

But seriously, there's loads of intelligent life. It's just not screaming constantly in all directions on the handful of frequencies we search.

$Then we move to phase two. Gas stations store fuel in underground tanks. Normally, these are inaccessible except via the pump. However, with hydraulic fracturing, we-- Wait! Come back!$

Bloody Mary is made of antimatter. It explains so much.

[earlier] "Your vintage-style handmade chest business is struggling. But I have a plan."

Will there ever be a physics term greater than 'tachyonic antitelephone?' According to this message from the future, the answer is 'no.'

Later I'm going to get a head start on the heat bath.

It's taken me 20 years, but I've finally finished rebuilding all my software to use 33-bit signed ints.

On the plus side, she wrote 'Welcome to the AAA Club!' in lipstick on the bathroom mirror, and left me a membership/roadside assistance card on the counter.

Even geology papers about Heart Mountain are like, "Look, we all agree this 'volcanic gas earthquake hovercraft' thing seems like it can't possibly be right, but..."

The plural of anecdote may not be data, but the singular of data is anecdote.

Instead of bobcat, package contained chair.

The failures usually don't hurt anything, and if it installs several versions, it increases the chance that one of them is right. (Note: The 'yes' command and '2>/dev/null' are recommended additions.)

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.)

It's definitely not the time to try drinking beer before liquor.

Good thing he didn't make it smaller, or it'd need someone three inches tall to play it.

If replacing all the '3's doesn't fix your code, remove the 4s, too, with 'ceiling(pi) / floor(pi) * pi * r^floor(pi)'. Mmm, floor pie.

HACK THE STARS

Some works didn't make the cut; in "Ecks vs. Sever" vs. the passage of time, the latter seems to have won pretty decisively.

Friggin' modern tents don't have a single piece of rope.

There's data suggesting that this model may apply to deep-dish/thin-crust pizza. I've designed a thorough multi-year study to investigate this personally, but funding organizations keep denying my grant requests.

That seems like an awful lot of hassle when all I wanted was a cool sword.

The combination croquet set/10-lane pool can also be used for some varieties of foosball and Skee-Ball.

I guess I need to apologize to my parents, friends, and the staff at Chuck E. Cheese's for all the times I called the cops on them.

For $5 I promise not to orchestrate this situation, and for $25 I promise not to take further advantage of this ability to create incentives.

If any of you want to meet some cool local oxygen atoms, I can introduce you!

The biggest I've seen in a published source in the wild is an 80-fold error in a reported distance, which I think came from a series of at least three unit conversions and area/length misinterpretations.