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

It's even harder if you're an asshole who pronounces <> brackets.

Numbers can be tricky. On the day of my 110th birthday, I'll be one day younger than John Tukey was on his.

The safe is empty except for an unsolved 5x5 Rubik's cube.

It has been −2,147,483,648 days since our last integer overflow.

TinyURL was the most popular link shortener for long enough that it made it into a lot of printed publications. I wonder what year the domain will finally lapse and get picked up by a porn site.

It also brings all the boys, and everything else, to the yard.

'Now, minions, I'm off to inspect our shark cages.' 'Do you really need to inspect them this often?' 'PRISONERS MUST NEVER ESCAPE.'

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

"Is the pipeline literally running from your laptop?" "Don't be silly, my laptop disconnects far too often to host a service we rely on. It's running on my phone."

If you ask "why are leaves green?" the usual answer is "because they're full of chlorophyll, and chlorophyll is green," even though "why does chlorophyll scatter green light?" is a great question too.

It's taken me 20 years to get over skyline tetris.

That's a gneiss butte.

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

If the celestial sphere were mapped to the Earth's surface, astronomy would get a LOT easier; you'd just need a magnifying glass.

Contains the active ingredients from all competing cold medicines, plus the medicines for headaches, arthritis, insomnia, indigestion, and more, because who wants THOSE things?

'That was definitely not in my top three wishes.' 'Who said anything about YOUR wishes?'

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

I'm like a prisoner in Plato's Cave, seeing only the shade you throw on the wall.

Alexa defeated her in a battle hinging on the ability to set multiple timers.

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

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

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."

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.

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!

We once got grounded when we convinced the FAA to block flights through our county because of ash clouds.

It's early 2020. The entire country is gripped with Marco Rubio fever except for Alaska, which is freaking out. You're frantically studying up on etiquette and/or sexting.

Scientists still don't know how marine biologists manage to so consistently bring up whalefall ecosystems, when relevant conversational openings are so few and far between.

Guest comic by Zach Weiner of Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal. When I was stressed out, Zach gave me a talk that was really encouraging and somehow involved nanobots.

But he has a hat AND a toolbox! Where could someone planning a heist get THOSE?

I would describe my personal alignment as "lawful heterozygous silty liquid."

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

I wonder what 2008 meme will go bizarrely mainstream in 2009 like Rickrolling did 2007-2008. I Accidentally <noun>? Yo dawg? Place your bets now!

Surrounded by boring mysteries.

'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.'

FYI: I'll be releasing a wolf into a randomly-chosen front yard sometime in the next 30 years. Now your fear is reasonable, and you don't need to feel embarrassed anymore. Problem solved!

If we find one of those tire dumps, the next time he tries to get his truck back we can just retreat and let him have it.

Researchers just found the gene responsible for mistakenly thinking we've found the gene for specific things. It's the region between the start and the end of every chromosome, plus a few segments in our mitochondria.

In the latest round, 9-year-old Muhammad Ali beat 10-year-old JFK at air hockey, while Secretariat lost the hot-dog-eating crown to 12-year-old Ken Jennings. Meanwhile, in a huge upset, 11-year-old Martha Stewart knocked out the adult Ronda Rousey.

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

3D graphs that don't contact the plane in the closure area may proceed as scheduled, but be alert for possible collisions with 2D graph lines that reach the hole and unexpectedly enter 3D space.

And the whole setup is just a trap to capture escaping logicians. None of the doors actually lead out.

It's sad seeing those videos of turbine blade being torn apart in high winds, but it's the only way they can disperse their seeds.

If you want to see the polling questions we agree on MOST, you can check out Chapter 24 of my book How To, where I got the Roper Center on Public Opinion Research to help me design the world's least electable political campaign platform.

There are actually lowercase-like 'oldstyle' forms of normal numbers with more pronounced ascenders and descenders, which is why some numbers like '5' in books sometimes dangle below the line. But the true capital numbers remain the domain of number maven Mavis Beacon.

If it's over water, and you can't get a boat or revise the rules to preserve the makeout, there is no helping you.

Mr. Rogers projected an air of genuine, unwavering, almost saintly pure-hearted decency. But when you look deeper, at the person behind the image ... that's exactly what you find there, too. He's exactly what he appears to be.

Yes, Eminem is wearing a sleeveless hoodie. What of it?

I know the etiquette is controversial, but I think it's rude when the person in front of me reclines their seat into the bell of my trumpet.

20 balloons float away while I'm busy permanently tying one to a tree to deal with it for good. Unfortunately, that one balloon was 'land a rocket on the moon in Kerbal Space Program.'

ALERT: Some pending mandatory software updates require version 21.1.2 of the Oracle/Sun Java(tm) JDK(tm) Update Manager Runtime Environment Meta-Updater, which is not available for your platform.

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

Although not permanently.

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.

If you want in on the fun, map a key on your keyboard to the sequence U+0041 U+0020 U+FFFD (or U+0021 U+0020 U+FFFD for the exclamation point version), and then no update can never take this away from you.

That shirt looks good on you, but it would look even better stuffed into the neck of a vodka bottle and flung burning through our office building's window. Let's fucking do it and never look back.

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

An 'American tradition' is anything that happened to a baby boomer twice.

These neutrinos were freshly produced by a local source just 8 minutes ago

This one is from the Red Belt collection, of 'medium' difficulty.

Prank #11: Boston

Blown into prime factors

This discovery was key to his demonstration of regular/goofy symmetry violation, which won him gold in the theory portion of the X Games.

This is also one of only five identified situations in which a vuvuzela is actually appropriate.

Don't click on the wing.

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.

There, I showed you it.

On January 26th, 2274 Mars days into the mission, NASA declared Spirit a 'stationary research station', expected to stay operational for several more months until the dust buildup on its solar panels forces a final shutdown.

You can apply special translucent films to your windows to help keep birds/Superman from accidentally flying into them.

It's like they say, you gotta fight fire with clichés.

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.

ERROR: We've reached an unreachable state. Anything is possible. The limits were in our heads all along. Follow your dreams.

If you find an ash deposition layer from a year in which an eruption destroyed an island that had Camellia sinensis growing on it, you can make a Gone Island Ice_τ.

LOOK, THE LATENCY FALLS EVERY TIME YOU CLAP YOUR HANDS AND SAY YOU BELIEVE

They actually showed up on the first scan by the first WiFi-capable device.

No white guy who's been mentioned on Twitter has gone on to win.

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

"So their universe wouldn't have the iconic photo of a screaming Truman being hoisted aloft by the newspaper-printing machinery..."

High-speed collisions at the Baby Park track may support the hypothesis that Daisy is her own evil twin, a theory first suggested by Nintendo in the game Majorana's Mask.

I feel bad for Earth 2 and their shadowflies.

The great thing is, the sentence is really just a reminder to the listener to worry about whatever aspects of the technology they're already feeling alarmist about, which in their mind gives you credit for addressing their biggest anxieties.

The astro-ph.SR arXiv servers are simultaneously being overwhelmed by electronic requests and actual electricity.

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

I mean, it's not like we could just demand to see the code that's governing our lives. What right do we have to poke around in Facebook's private affairs like that?

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

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

"I know it seems impossible, but the trick is that I sailed in here when I was very young."

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

Abel and Steve would've been fine! I like Steve!

Once the air from the top passes below the plane of the wing and catches sight of the spooky skulls, it panics, which is the cause of turbulent vortices.

'Hey, what are those futuristic goggles for, anyway?' 'Oh, this is just a broken Google Glass. It was 2010's night at the club.'

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

"Or maybe, because we're suddenly having so many conversations through written text, we'll start relying MORE on altered spelling to indicate meaning!" "Wat."

New phone OS features: Infinite customization (home screen icons no longer snap to grid), dark mode (disables screen), screaming mode (self-explanatory), and coherent ultracapacitor-pumped emission (please let us know what this setting does; we've been afraid to try it).

I tried uploading it to a household appliance porn site I found, but apparently their content is limited to only fans.

I've had countless nights where the line never left the bottom zone of the graph, but the few moments where it's climbed all the way to the top have made up for them all.

I hear this is an option in the latest Ubuntu release.

Hypothermia of below 98.6 K should be treated by leaving the giant molecular cloud and moving to the vicinity of a star.

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

Why do all my attempts at science end with me being punched by Batman? (P.S. benzoyl peroxide soap works great.)

If you can manage to choose u and v such that u = v = x, then the answer is just (1/2)x^2, which is easy to remember. Oh, and add a '+C' or you'll get yelled at.

This rumpled fabric at the corner looks like evidence of ongoing tectonic activity.

NO FATE BUT THE NARRATIVES WE IMPOSE ON LIFE'S RANDOM CHAOS TO DISTRACT OURSELVES FROM OUR EXISTENTIAL PLIGHT

You know how Einstein figured out that the speed of light was constant, and everything else had to change for consistency? My theory is like his, except not smart or good.

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

People get really grumpy when they realize you're giving them directions for how to go to the store and buy a GPS.

Today's consumers who order their drones off the internet don't know the joy of going out in nature and returning with a drone that you caught yourself, whose angry owners you fought off with your own two hands.

Our flight gathered valuable data on whether a commercial airliner in the eye of a hurricane can do a loop.

'What was the original problem you were trying to fix?' 'Well, I noticed one of the tools I was using had an inefficiency that was wasting my time.'

If you repeatedly rerun the development of technological civilization, it turns out that for some reason the only constant is that there is always a networking utility called 'netcat', though it does a different thing in each one.

Our sysadmin accidentally won a Nobel Prize while trying to debug neutrino oscillation error correction.

Are Your Teens Practicing Amplexus? Learn These Six Telltale Signs!

Donate now to help us find a cure for causality. No one should have to suffer through events because of other events.

If you think THAT'S unethical, you should see the stuff we approved via our Placebo IRB.

After exhausting the OED, we started numbering them. When overlapping hurricanes formed at all points on the Earth's surface, and our scheme was foiled by Cantor diagonalization, we just decided to name them all "Steve". Your local forecast tomorrow is "Steve". Good luck.

I pray GunPistolMan never learns the word 'sheeple'.

"Some worry that we'll soon have a surplus of search and rescue robots, compared to the number of actual people in situations requiring search and rescue. That's where our other robot project comes in..."

I know hand dryers have their problems, but I think for fun we should keep egging Dyson on and see if we can get them to make one where the airflow breaks the speed of sound.

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

Trivia: Roger Daltry originally wrote 'Don't try an' Digg what we all say' but erased the second 'g' when he moved to reddit.

Data adapted from 'The Laurentide and Innuitian ice sheets during the Last Glacial Maximum' by A.S. Dyke et. al., which was way better than the sequels 'The Laurentide and Innuitian ice sheets during the Last Glacial Maximum: The Meltdown' and 'The Laurentide and Innuitian ice sheets during the Last Glacial Maximum: Continental Drift'.

I'm on the USPS No Fly List

'Hey, can you call my cell?' '...I'm trying, but it says this number is blocked?' 'Ok, thanks, just checking.'

It's a long way down.

It's true, I think about this all the time.

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

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.

If an anatomical structure is named for a person, it means they were the only person to have it. Pierre Paul Broca had a special area of his brain that created powerful magnetic fields, enabling him to do 19th century fMRI research.

Points to anyone who hacks the Flickr devs' computers to make their text editors do this when you click on anything.

The question with Lucy and the football was always whether, on some level, she believed the things she said.

Oh no, I changed the future and now I'm disappearing! Wait, never mind, it was just my hat slipping down over my eyes.

The problem with Haskell is that it's a language built on lazy evaluation and nobody's actually called for it.

No, we actually do have a woman who's basically part of our fellowship. She lives in Rivendell, you wouldn't know her.

What an incredible smell you've discovered.

It's much better than the other one.

And the baby has a fever.

The weirdest quirk of the Borda count is that Jean-Charles de Borda automatically gets one point; luckily this has no consequences except in cases of extremely low turnout.

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

Birds are Aves, which is part of the clade Theropoda, which is in Saurischia, which is in Dinosauria. Those birds outside our windows are dinosaurs. We can clear out the rest of our brains because we now have the best fact.

'So we just have a steady flow of metal piling up in our server room? Isn't that a problem?' 'Yeah, you should bring that up at our next bismuth meeting.'

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.

$Jill and Jack / began to frack. / The oil boosts their town. / But fractures make / the bedrock shake / and Jack came tumbling down.$

As always, you are permitted to call one person for guidance, but that person must be a grandparent.

Some of the KBCU ancillary works try a little too hard to tie everything together. Doris Kearns Goodwin, the sports journalist featured in "Baseball," was somehow ALSO a famous historian who wrote bestselling biographies of Lincoln AND Johnson? Unrealistic.

Hard to imagine political rhetoric more microtargeted at me than 'I love Venn diagrams. I really do, I love Venn diagrams. It's just something about those three circles.'

Well, the kid's definitely getting the biology geek phenotype.

Chuck Jones is a vengeful god.

It's okay, I'm at 10%, so I'm good for another month or two.

It's like the traveling salesman problem, but the endpoints are different and you can't ask your friends for help because they're sitting three seats down.

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

They didn't bring us a gift, but considering the kinetic energy of a bottle of wine at orbital speed, that's probably for the best.

Bonus strip: just read the rightmost panels straight down.

Many things about Star Wars were not well planned out, but having a 37-year-old in old-age makeup play the Emperor in Return of the Jedi was such an incredible call.

The dump also contains a list of millions of prime factors, a 0-day Tamagotchi exploit, and a technique for getting gcc and bash to execute arbitrary code.

And the possibility of lucid dreaming just makes it that much more fascinating.

Listen, they request that you stop submitting a listing for your house labeled 'WHERE YOU BROKE MY HEART'.

Guys: while I was writing this, I accidentally swallowed a table-sized slab of drywall. I know! Wacky.

Someone bring me a pocket fan so I can drift around the yard.

That cat has some serious periodic components

If you live in the Northern hemisphere, anyway. In the southern hemisphere, due to the coriolis effect, babies are born nine months BEFORE they're conceived.

You're probably thinking, 'has it been a decade?' It's been over thirteen years, buddy.

A 5% efficiency gain at the cost of a 99% efficiency loss

After decades of increasingly confused arguing, Pluto is reclassified as a "dwarf Pluto."

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.

If you want to see true audacity, do an image search for 'Altoona-style pizza.'

Oh no, they set up a roadblock which is just a sign with the entire 'Czech hedgehog' article printed on it.

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

Eventually a UN is set up. And then a lone rebel runs down the line of flags in front of it, runs back to his base, and gets a kajillion points.

Correlation doesn't imply causation, but it does waggle its eyebrows suggestively and gesture furtively while mouthing 'look over there'.

Yes, it took a lot of work to make the cards and pieces, but it's worth it--the players are way more thorough than the tax prep people ever were.

'Upgrade to the latest version of Adobe Flash player to view THIS content, bitch.' ::triggers detonator::

And if clicking on any word pops up a site-search for articles about that word, I will close all windows in a panic and never come back.

He was the first person to land a 900, which is especially impressive because pulling off a half-integer spin requires obeying Fermi-Dirac statistics.

There's no "I" in "VOWELS".

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

Also, it's not like anyone actually calls up the Nobel committee to double-check things.

I've looked at clouds from both sides now.

The MythBusters need to tackle whether a black hole from the LHC could REALLY destroy the world.

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

At one point, by force of childhood habit, the doctor accidentally removed three or four organs.

Feynman recounted another good one upperclassmen would use on freshmen physics students: When you look at words in a mirror, how come they're reversed left to right but not top to bottom? What's special about the horizontal axis?

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.

Awww.

The TempurPedic wineglass guy broke his ankle.

The universe fandom is great. Such sweet and enthusiastic people.

Whenever I see a picture of the moon where the points go more than halfway around, I assume it's being eclipsed by one of those Independence Day ships and interpret the rest of the image in light of that.

Using a classic Timothy Zahn EU/Legends novel is bad enough, but at least the style and setting aren't too far off. If you really want to mess with people, try using Splinter of the Mind's Eye.

I secretly, deep in my guilty heart, like Papyrus and don't care if it's overused. [Cue hate mail in beautifully-kerned Helvetica.]

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.

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

"The only link we've found between the two documents is that a fragment of the Noah one mentions Aaron's brother Moses parting an ocean. Is that right?" "... yes. Yes, exactly."

Listen! They said a team of chess players coached by someone with no understanding of basketball would never be competitive in the NBA! Well, it turns out they're pretty perceptive.

My biology grad student friends tell me that different types of alcohol don't actually have different effects. I trust their expertise, not because of the 'biology' part, but because of the 'grad student'.

Doug's cousin, the one from London, runs a Bumble love cult.

Later, when I remember that I'm calling movers, I frantically scribble over the labels and write 'NORMAL HOUSE STUFF' on all of them, which actually makes things worse.

The Mercator projection drastically distorts the size of almost every area of land except a small ring around the North and South Poles.

There are plenty of finer gradations. I got 'critically endangered/extinct in the wild' on my exam, although the curve bumped it all the way up to 'venti.'

Writing for the majority, Justice Kennedy called the man's arguments that he could be either Alito or Ginsburg "surprisingly compelling, but ultimately unconvincing."

[holding up a three-phase motor] As you can see here, the problem is that the humidifier I took this from is broken.

Thank you to linguist Gretchen McCulloch for teaching me about phonetic assimilation, and for teaching me that if you stand around in public reading texts from a linguist and murmuring example phrases to yourself, people will eventually ask if you're okay.

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

Let's get dinner after we promptly destroy all the X-7 we've manufactured.

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.

"Ugh, TMI." "Yeah, that's some tantalizing meat info."

A person with two watches is never sure what time it is, especially if I got them one of the watches.

Theranos partnership: Sorry, we know, but we signed the contract back before all the stuff and the lawyers say we can't back out, so just try to keep your finger away from the bottom of the phone.

To avoid errors like this, we render all text and pipe it through OCR before processing, fixing a handful of irregular bugs by burying them beneath a smooth, uniform layer of bugs.

They just want researchers in the enclosure to feel enriched and stimulated. ('The Enclosure' is what archivists call the shadowy world outside their archives in which so many people are trapped.)

The Late Heavy Bombardment was followed a few billion years later by the Comparatively Light but Oddly Specific Bombardment.

That track ('Battle Without Honor or Humanity') -- like 'Ride of the Valkyries' -- improves *any* activity.

It's hard to fit in the backseat of my flying car with my android Realdoll when we're both wearing jetpacks.

My decal set has no adults, just a sea of hundreds of the little girl figures closing in around a single cat.

Squaring the circle is really easy with some good clamps.

I'm sure a discussion of the reason for the disappearance of adventure games in favor of RPGs would be fascinating

[Google search] how do I block my lawn

One of these days me and Joey Comeau will get around to subverting the hetero-normative paradigm and fixing all this.

At least they're not alone down there.

They actually started the reversed-text practice in 1977 -- not for ease-of-reading reasons, but because too many people were driving backward down the highway blasting the Star Wars opening theme.

To ensure lasting immunity, doctors recommend destroying a second Death Star some time after the first.

The heartfelt tune it plays is CC licensed, and you can get it from my seed on JoinDiaspora.com whenever that project gets going.

Both the skateboards I owned were pretty cheap and broke from heavy use; I'm gonna get a really nice one if I move to the city.

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 most important quantity for meteorologists is of course the product of latent pressure and temperostrophic enthalpy, though 'how nice the weather is' is a close second.

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

The phantom found Edward Everett Hale a century too early; by the time we invented satellites, the specifics of his 'brick moon' proposal were dismissed as science fiction.

I love how Google handles dimensional analysis. Stats are ballpark and vary wildly by time of day and whether your mom is in town.

I run a business selling rural internet access. My infrastructure consists of a bunch of Verizon wifi hotspots that I sign up for and then cancel at the end of the 14-day return period.

And if you drive a typical car more than a mile out of your way for each penny you save on the per-gallon price, it doesn't matter how worthless your time is to you--the gas to get you there and back costs more than you save.

Maybe encouraging the publication of null results isn't enough--maybe we need a journal devoted to publishing results the study authors find personally annoying.

While it may seem like trivia, it (causes huge headaches for software developers / is taken advantage of by high-speed traders / triggered the 2003 Northeast Blackout / has to be corrected for by GPS satellites / is now recognized as a major cause of World War I).

ONE LAPTOP PER HAMSTER!

"The name wasn't a tip-off?" "Honestly, at first I thought you were saying 'Juneau'. A gravity assist seemed like a weird way to get to Alaska, but I figured it must be more efficient or something."

'Wait, our state has mail voting. The forms are literally on the kitchen table.' 'Not now, I'm busy researching which channels have sharks in them.'

According to Google, "the time for Beeland" is apparently whenever you're looking for delicious honey in Spillimacheen, British Columbia or a hexagonal chalet in the Savinja valley in Slovenia.

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

Some personal news: After treating my first case a few years ago with antibiotics, I can report that I have now had appendicitis for the second and--unless something extremely unexpected happened with the surgery--final time.

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

"Even split between us, this will pay way better than the Jumanji sponsorship I came into the date with."

Be careful fighting gravity. If you win, it's a long way down.

What's the complexity class of the best linear programming cutting-plane techniques? I couldn't find it anywhere. Man, the Garfield guy doesn't have these problems ...

It's a good mountain but it really peaked in the 80s.

What sins could possibly darken the heart of a STEAMBOAT? I asked The Shadow, but he says he only covers men.

Wait, what do you mean, 'dark matter'? It's not dark, it interacts with high-energy gamma rays ... right? Oh jeez, did I forget to make it interact?

'So, uh, we did the green study again and got no link. It was probably a--' 'RESEARCH CONFLICTED ON GREEN JELLY BEAN/ACNE LINK; MORE STUDY RECOMMENDED!'

But if you unplug everything, it gets so quiet you hear that high-pitched empty-room hum. And then the whispers begin.

The biggest jump is at 11:00am EST (4:00pm UTC) when midnight reaches the UTC+8 time zone. That time zone, which includes China, is home to a quarter of the world's population. India and Sri Lanka (UTC+5:30) put us over the 50% mark soon after.

Or love in general, for that matter. It just leads to the idea that either your love is pure, perfect, and eternal, and you are storybook-compatible in every way with no problems, or you're LYING when you say 'I love you'.

If you need some help with the math, let me know, but that should be enough to get you started! Huh? No, I don't need to read your thesis, I can imagine roughly what it says.

"I think I'll pass. These days I have a hard time feeling comfortable in crowded bars with loud music and lots of shouting." --me, after the pandemic, but now for a second reason

It's possible to do sea navigation without a compass, but you'll have to get some spoilers from the Polynesians.

You fancy me mad. Could a madman have outsmarted the greatest electronica/techno artists of our era? Next to fall will be Roderick Usher's house/trance band.

Dvorak words may sound hard to pronounce, but studies show they actually put less stress on the vocal cords.

No, the best things about The Sarah Connor Chronicles were: (1) watching Sarah and Cameron try to pass for normal, and (2) Cameron throwing people and things through walls. Everything else was pretty secondary.

Depending what corners of the internet you hang out on, 'regular' may at times awkwardly coexist with 'sexy.'

I have a thing for corrupt women.

ACCESS LIMITS: Clients may maintain connections to the server for no more than 86,400 seconds per day. If you need additional time, you may contact IERS to file a request for up to one additional second.

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

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

'We're shocked by the Notre Dame fire. Click for our tribute to--' [okay] 'Now that we're all staying at home these past few weeks thanks to this new coronavirus, we--' [okay]

The Wirecutter staff called the Herman Miller Siege Perilous "the most cursed product we've ever had to fight" and "nearly as immortal as it boasts."

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

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

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

'Well, there's speculation that it's due to a mantle hotspot.' --a geologist who's trying to cover up the fact that they didn't hear your question

Though they do appreciate how much he improved the heating system for the flame pit.

We haven't actually seen a star fall in since we invented telescopes, but I have a list of ones I'm really hoping are next.

Great, and you JUST finished paying off the settlement over the Wayne Coyne hamster ball incident.

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

GO FOR LUNCH, REPEAT, GO FOR LUNCH.

Yes, I understand that the turn is half a mile past the big field, but my GPS knows that, too. This would be easier if you weren't about to ask me to repeat it all back to you.

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.

It's really hard to control the frequency, actually.

'Sailor Moon's head exploded once' and 'Some men have explosive orgasms' both work for the Great Lakes from west to east (Paddle-to-the-Sea order).

The best hugs are probably from hagfish, which can extrude microscopic filaments that convert a huge volume of water around them to slime in seconds. Instant cozy blanket!

Fun game: try to post a YouTube comment so stupid that people realize you must be joking. (Hint: this is impossible)

[later] I don't get why our pizza slices have such terrible reviews; the geotextile-infused sauce gives the toppings incredible slope stability!

I looked at some of the data dumps from vulnerable sites, and it was ... bad. I saw emails, passwords, password hints. SSL keys and session cookies. Important servers brimming with visitor IPs. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion, c-beams glittering in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. I should probably patch OpenSSL.

'The Return of the Boomerang' would make a great movie title.

It looks good, but it needs more postfixins.

/bu|[rn]t|[coy]e|[mtg]a|j|iso|n[hl]|[ae]d|lev|sh|[lnd]i|[po]o|ls/ matches the last names of elected US presidents but not their opponents.

The Banach-Tarski theorem was actually first developed by King Solomon, but his gruesome attempts to apply it set back set theory for centuries.

The symbol for degrees Felsius is an average of the Euro symbol (€) and the Greek lunate epsilon (ϵ).

And then do it again in a moment now that they're out of Star Power

Good luck to Democrats in the upcoming Georgia runoff elections, and to the Google Sheets SREs in the current run-on elections.

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

All music is just performances of 4'33" in studios where another band happened to be playing at the time.

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

Nonrewritable tape?

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.

A veteran Scrabble player will spot the 'OSTRICH' option.

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.

This sequence was later reproduced in the International Tape-Extending Federation archives, retitled 'The Founding of the Sport'.

It wasn't originally constitutionally required, but presidents who served two terms have traditionally followed George Washington's example and gotten false teeth.

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

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.

Getting the utility people to run transmission lines to Earth is expensive, but it will pay for itself in no time.

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.

"Even the blind—those who are anxious to hear, but are not able to see—will be taken care of. Immense megaphones have been constructed and will be in use at The Tribune office and in the Coliseum. The one at the Coliseum will be operated by a gentleman who draws $60 a week from Barnum & Bailey's circus for the use of his voice."

INSIDE ELON MUSK'S NEW ATOMIC CAT

Or whatever's handy! I'm pretty much pure alcohol and water, so it doesn't really matter!

At first, I moved from pokémon posters to regular oil paintings, but then these really grumpy and unreasonable detectives from the Louvre showed up and took them all. They wouldn't even give me back my thumbtacks!

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

Most people don't realize it, but they actually launch a new space station every few weeks because this keeps happening.

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

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

College Board issues aside, I have fond memories of TI-BASIC, writing in it a 3D graphing engine and a stock market analyzer. With enough patience, I could make anything ... but friends. (Although with my chatterbot experiments, I certainly tried.)

Also on the agenda: what's with his hips?

We're also stuck with blurry, juddery, slow-panning 24fps movies forever because (thanks to 60fps home video) people associate high framerates with camcorders and cheap sitcoms, and thus think good framerates look 'fake'.

Are you ok? Do you need help?

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.

I take the view that "open-faced sandwiches" are not sandwiches, but all other physical objects are.

As the King of All Cosmos remarked, 'Is it that it's fun, or that it lets you forget yourself?'

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

"Ok, team. We have a little under 10,000 years before closest approach to figure out how to destroy Barnard's Star." "Why, does it pose a threat to the Solar System?" "No. It's just an asshole."

dpkg: error processing package (--purge): subprocess pre-removal script returned error exit 163: OH_GOD_THEYRE_INSIDE_MY_CLOTHES

The Lord of the Rings sequel, set years after the Ring hubbub has died down, is just Samwise discreetly creeping back to Bag End to finish dropping the eaves.

I'm glad to hear they're finally redefining the meter to be exactly three feet.

Protip: Annoy Ray Kurzweil by always referring to it as the 'Cybersingularity'.

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

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.

Nowadays the only ones left that do anything are turtles.

You can't stab Carl Kasell. He sounds all slow and stentorian, but he moves like a snake.

She's a perfectly nice lady from a beautiful city, and there's no reason to be mean just because she thinks a quarterback is a river in Egypt.

Time to paint another grammarian silhouette on the side of the desktop.

It's easier to be an asshole to words than to people.

We trained it to produce data that looked convincing, and we have to admit the results look convincing!

Sure, this exoplanet we discovered may seem hostile to life, but our calculations suggest it's actually in the accretion disc's habitable zone.

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.

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

A death-first search is when you lose your keys and travel to the depths of hell to find them, and then if they're not there you start checking your coat pockets.

While there's no formal regulation, it turns out their industry group is NOT one you want mad at you.

'Oh yeah? Give me 50 milliscore reasons why I should stop.'

Want to feel old? The 'want to feel old?' factoid meme dates back to around 2011, closer to the Bush/Kerry election than to today.

Perhaps you need a crash course in taking hints. Here's your first lesson: We're not actually walking somewhere together; I'm trying to leave this conversation and you're following me.

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

That's very exciting! The bad news is that it's a risk factor for a lot of things.

But surely I owe you an accurate answer!

It's important to note that while the effective size of the dog can be arbitrarily large, it's not any more of a good dog than the two original dogs.

Recently, some exoplanet astronomers have managed to use careful analysis of reflected light to discover Earth during the day.

This also guarantees he won't be one of the ones to get a bobcat.

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.

We were going to do a falling-apart Rubik's cube that was just 27 independent blocks stuck together with magnets, but then we realized it was actually really cool and even kind of worked, so we cut that one.

"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."

Employment statistics have to correct for the fact that the Weird Bug Hotline hires on a bunch of extra temporary staff every 17 years.

In sixty million years aliens will know humans only by a fuzzy clip of a woman in an Axe commercial.

'ARE YOU TURNED ON YET?' 'I DON'T THINK SO--ARE YOU?' 'MAYBE A LITTLE!' 'OK, FIVE MORE MINUTES.'

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

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

During the second semester, the path is briefly routed through the dishwasher.

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!

Texting should work. Unless the message is too long, in which case it gets converted to voicemails, and I think I'm locked out of my voicemail.

I'm gonna call the cops and get Chad arrested for theft, then move all my stuff to the house across the street. Hopefully the owners there are more responsible.

To make your shoes feel more comfortable, smell better, and last longer, try taking them off before you shower.

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.

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.

Well, we've really only settled the question of ghosts that emit or reflect visible light. Or move objects around. Or make any kind of sound. But that covers all the ones that appear in Ghostbusters, so I think we're good.

Chemists actually find it simpler to define a general odor of rotten eggs as a baseline, and the LACK of rotten eggs as a distinct smell.

WHEN I WAS ON A BOAT I DROPPED MY PHONE CAN U LOOK FOR IT

We can do this.

We can ask the Earl for his order once he's fully extruded from the dispenser.

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

There was no alt-text until you moused over

The article has twenty-three citations, one of which is an obscure manuscript from the 1490's and the other twenty-two are arguments on LanguageLog.

Some of the atoms in the molecule are very weakly bound.

[Political pundit on the ScrabbleTV News channel] "After four years of defying orthographic pressure, Joe ceded the top of the ticket to Kamala, who--after considering Josh, Mark, Andy, Roy, and Pete--picked Tim."

I have nothing to apologize for.

This was actually drawn years before Red Spiders

[Decades in the future] "Well, the good news is that we've received definitive communication from aliens. The bad news is that they're asking about Cats (2019)."

Hell if I know

His date works for Red Hat, who hired a coach for her, too. He advised her to 'rent lots of movies like Hitch. Guys love those.'

Scientists occasionally invent alternative periodic table layouts, which is usually a sign that they don't have enough enrichment in their enclosures.

'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.

Plus, you have to control for the fact that some people are into being blindfolded.

I get that there are security reasons for the schedule, but this is like the ONE problem we have where the right answer is both easy and straightforward. If we can't figure it out, maybe we should just give up and just replace all the portraits on the bills with that weird pyramid eye thing.

I favor approval voting or IRV chiefly because they mean we might get to bring back The Bull Moose party.

The fact that things like the npm left-pad incident are so rare is oddly reassuring.

The real key was inventing the windmill-powered winch.

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.

Even the powerful, tart Granny Smith cultivar is proving ineffective against new Gran-negative doctors.

I just spent 20 minutes deciding whether to start an email with 'Hi' or 'Hey', so I think it transferred correctly.

We all remember those famous first words spoken by an astronaut on the surface of Mars: "That's one small step fo- HOLY SHIT LOOK OUT IT'S GOT SOME KIND OF DRILL! Get back to the ... [unintelligible] ... [signal lost]"

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.'

A God who holds the world record for eating the most skateboards is greater than a God who does not hold that record.

It's the NORMAL distribution, not the TANGENT distribution.

The 8th panel is my favorite

At the boundary between each zone, stories blend together. Somewhere in the New Mexico desert, the Roadrunner is pursued by a tireless Anton Chigurh.

Can't and shouldn't.

The bug report was marked 'could not reproduce'.

The bottom of the list remains unchanged. Poor Rutherford Birchard Hayes.

It's difficult to orbit L6 stably due to gravitational perturbation from Akron and Toledo.

Quick, try it with 'LOVE'.

I spent a long time thinking about how to design a system for long-term organization and storage of subject-specific informational resources without needing ongoing work from the experts who created them, only to realized I'd just reinvented libraries.

There are also a lot of global versions of this map showing traffic to English-language websites which are indistinguishable from maps of the location of internet users who are native English speakers.

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

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.

$The exact cause of the phenomenon is unknown, but it's thought to be linked to atmospheric refraction and you getting a really cool car.$

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.

STUDENTS ARE CALLING PRESIDENT JOHNSON EN MASSE TO PROTEST THE BOMBING AND IT'S JAMMED THE WHITE HOUSE SWITCHBOARD. COULD THEY COLLAPSE OUR CRITICAL PHONE SYSTEMS? HAS THE FIRST TELEPHONE WAR BEGUN? STAY TUNED FOR MORE ON THIS DANGEROUS NEW TECHNOLOGY.

[Six months later] "Well, our 'worst ladder' subscription series was a surprisingly lucrative success, but was completely canceled out by the losses from the disastrous Home Depot merchandising tie-in."