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

There used to be these ads, see . . .

They're robust against quantum attacks because it's hard to make a quantum system that large.

It's an amazing time of day; the light is great for photography.

"Okay, for the last time, the shot is free, so we can't--" "Shut up and take my money!"

'Barack Obama is much less likely than the average cat to jump in and out of cardboard boxes for fun' is low precision, but I'm not sure about the accuracy.

Our anti-de Sitter club is small at the moment, but I've started corresponding with the conformal field theory people.

Mrs. Roberts would have gotten up sooner, of course, but she was busy piping find ~ and find ~nomad into xargs shred, just in case.

My thighs have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord?

So glad Kate over in R&D pushed for using the AlgoMaxAnalyzer to look into this. Hiring her was a great decisio- waaaait.

It looks good, but it needs more postfixins.

Later, at home: 'Dear diary: Still can't figure out what to write here ...'

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.

I actually remember being entertained by both the sequels while in the theater. They just don't hold up nearly as well in later comparison.

People think power over ethernet is so great, and yet when I try to do water over ethernet everyone yells at me.

The research was overseen by the Institutional Review Board, which is what I named my surfboard.

a(b+c)=(ab)+(ac). Politicize that, bitches.

Sadly, it probably won't even have enough gas to make it to the first border crossing.

I can't help myself; now I want to read a bunch of thinkpieces from newspapers in Biff's 1985 arguing over whether the growth of the region into a corporate dystopia was inevitable.

Sure, it may not meet science fair standards, but I want credit for getting my baking soda and vinegar mountain added to the Decade Volcanoes list.

'Is it worth anything?' 'I dunno, is the answer to that question worth another $5?'

PYTHON FLAG ENABLE THREE LAWS

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.

Trains rotate the Earth around various axes while elevators shift its position in space.

If you ever want to get beaten up by a bunch of graphic designers, try removing the serifs from Times New Roman and adding them to Comic Sans.

Way to not support the GMA 950 under OS X, Spore. :(

The git vehicle fleet eventually pivoted to selling ice cream, but some holdovers remain. If you flag down an ice cream truck and hand the driver a floppy disk, a few hours later you'll get an invite to a git repo.

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.

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

Junior astronomers hate getting put on board update duty, but someone's gotta make sure that stuff is still up there.

If you call my regular number, it just goes to my pager.

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

When Pope Gregory XIII briefly shortened the light-year in 1582, it led to navigational chaos and the loss of several Papal starships.

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

We definitely put the pool in a mine for shielding. It was absolutely not to hide it from the funding people.

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

'Thank you for the loveliest evening I've ever had...' [normal] '...east of the Mississippi.' [instant intrigue!]

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.

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

See also: Spider-Man reboot in which he can produce several inches of web, doesn't need as much chalk powder on his hands when he goes rock climbing, and occasionally feels vaguely uneasy about situations.

What do you want me to do? LEAVE? Then they'll keep being wrong!

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

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

When it explodes, it will cast off its outer layers, leaving behind nothing but a slowly fading PalmPilot, calculator, or two-way pager.

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

Sitting here idly trying to figure out how the population of the Old West in the late 1800s compares to the number of Red Dead Redemption 2 players.

Now that I've finally gotten an electric vehicle, I'm never going back to an acoustic one.

I can't believe Candles of Vienna caved to commercial pressure and added the Goku expansion.

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.

And the worst part is you won't apologize.

The contagious period ends right around when you start to sound sick over the phone, which is probably evidence of cold viruses evolving to spread optimally in the workplace.

And no avian society ever develops space travel because it's impossible to focus on calculus when you could be outside flying.

Wait a minute. If I'm escaping from a submarine at 50 meters, then I'll *definitely* need a flashlight to find air pockets for gradual decompression on the way up. Time to start shopping professional dive lights.

Eno's storied aria was once soloed by Judge Lance Ito on the alto oboe at Ohio's AirAsia Arena.

[10 years later] Man, why are people so comfortable handing Google and Facebook control over our nuclear weapons?

Since it sounds like your time spent typing can't possibly be less productive than your time spent not typing, have you tried typing SLOWER?

The only downside is that it would be a little uncomfortable

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.

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

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.

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.

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

Of course, "Number of times I've gotten to make a decision twice to know for sure how it would have turned out" is still at 0.

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

We'll pay you $1.47 to post on social media about our products, $2.05 to mention it in any group chats you're in, and 11 cents per passenger each time you drive your office carpool past one of our billboards.

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).

'Smilodon fatalis' narrowly edged out 'Tyrannosaurus rex' to win this year's Most Badass Latin Names competition, after edging out 'Dracorex hogwartsia' and 'Stygimoloch spinifer' (meaning 'horned dragon from the river of death') in the semifinals.

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

I always wanted to impress them with how well I could hear, didn't you? Also, this sets the record for number of awkward-pause panels in one strip (previously held by Achewood)

Then I'll start work on my lunar engines to line the Moon up with the ecliptic so we can have a solar eclipse every month (with a little wobble so they're not always on the equator.)

Calligraphy exam: Write down the number 37, spelled out, nicely.

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

It's commonly believed that Lorentz contraction makes objects appear flatter along the direction of travel. However, this ignores light travel times. In fact, a fast-moving butt would appear rotated toward the observer but not substantially distorted. Shakira was right.

All I want is a secure system where it's easy to do anything I want. Is that so much to ask?

I asked a few friends whether they'd had this happen, then looked up the popularity of their initials/names over time. Based on those numbers, it looks like there must be at least 750,000 people in the US alone who think 'Sure, that's probably my email address' on a regular basis.

The other two are still lost on the infinite plane of uniform density.

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

Conspiracy theory: There's no such thing as corn. Those fields you see are just the stalks of a fungus that's controlling our brains to make us want to spread it.

When we started distributing special status tokens that signify which people are important enough to join an elite group, we never could have imagined we might be creating some problems down the line.

If you reach 122, you get complete unrevertible editorial control over Jeanne Calment's Wikipedia article.

DUCKLOOP'D?

Like spelling 'dammit' correctly -- with two m's -- it's a troll that works best on the most literate.

Dear Peter Wiggin: This letter is to inform you that you have received enough upvotes on your reddit comments to become president of the world. Please be at the UN tomorrow at 8:00 sharp.

Certified skydiving instructors know way more about safely falling from planes than I do, and are way more likely to die that way.

The Norwegian adaptation of The Sword in the Stone takes things in a weird direction.

You'd need to keep track of so many people! Would you use, like, Excel or something? Far too fancy for a simple country nanoenzyme developer like me.

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

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

Turning in other directions can be accomplished by using a magnetized centerboard and ocean currents, since a current flowing through a magnetic field induces a Laplace force.

'No idea what I was thinking! Haha! But anyway, maybe we should check out what this Ba'al guy has to say.'

I think you mean 'GNU Info Override'.

Because they orbit the Earth every 90 minutes, some astronauts should try to argue that, due to CDC regulations and time zone technicalities, they should be able to get their second dose just 30 or 40 hours after their first.

I love their cover of 1,200 Balloons, Dalmatians, and Miles.

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.

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

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

"Although fresh juice DOES sound--" "NO! For humanity to survive we must learn from the mistakes of the past."

Good to be a little wary of advice that sounds too much like a self pep talk.

Let me just scroll down and check behind that rock. Annnnd ... nope, page copyright year starts with '19'. Oh God, is this a WEBRING?

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

The Earth's five major mass extinctions were the Posh Extinction, the Sporty Extinction, the Scary Extinction, the Ginger Extinction, and the Baby Extinction.

To that stranger on the KOOL Tree House chat room, I gotta hand it to you: You were, ultimately, not wrong.

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.)

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

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

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

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

Man, this emo shit was supposed to be for people who didn't have hats.

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

Where did you even get this wall? Return it there and stand it back up right now.

Oh right, eye contact. Ok, good, holding the eye contact ... holding ... still holding ... ok, too long! Getting weird! Quick, look thoughtfully into space and nod. Oh, dammit, said 'yeah' again!

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.

Despite having now taken three months longer than the airplane people, we're making disappointingly little progress toward the obvious next stage of vehicle: The Unobtanium-hulled tunneling ship from the 2003 film 'The Core.'

The robot is pregnant. It isn't mine.

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

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.

Man, this trick has saved me so many times.

It's believed that Golgi was originally an independent organism who was eventually absorbed into our cells, where he began work on his Apparatus.

I understand it's hard to do more than 300 feet on these 90-second rush jobs, but with a smaller ramp I'm worried the gee forces will be too high for me to do any tricks.

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').

'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 you don't end the 99 Bottles of Beer recursion at N=0 it just becomes The Other Song That Never Ends.

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

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

Remember, your answers to the physics census are confidential; we will not be issuing Pauli exclusion principle citations.

"Mostly it means that I'm acutely aware that the kid one table over coughed as the server walked past with our food."

"All the companies whose blimps I shot fireworks at are mad, but MetLife is especially miffed because I dressed up as the Red Baron."

The other side of USB-C is rotationally symmetric except that the 3rd pin from the top is designated FIREWIRE TRIBUTE PIN.

So what do we do when we get to base 10? Do we use A, B, C, etc? No: Numbers larger than about 3.6 million are simply illegal.

For a long time, people thought maybe Usain Bolt was the one for running, until the 2090s and the incredible dominance of Derek Legs.

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

zo'o ta jitfa .i .e'o xu do pendo mi

If you have an old phone in a drawer, and you listen very carefully, you can occasionally hear the occasional tap of an emitted SIM card hitting the side of the drawer as the phone transmutes to a lower-end model.

You can look at practically any part of anything manmade around you and think 'some engineer was frustrated while designing this.' It's a little human connection.

The xkcd Survey: Big Data for a Big Planet

Once the lockdown is over, let's all get together and swap starters!

'Look to my coming on the fifth day. At dawn, look to the east.' 'And look to the west to see our shadows!'

The state has had so many contact tracers disappear into that shop that they've had to start a contact tracer tracing program.

Opening dialogue by Scott

Sharks can occasionally travel short distances through air when pursuing prey, but their attenuation coefficient is pretty high.

Wait, this is space -- how are you talking to me? And, as an afterthought, what's up with the hole in reality?

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

West Norsussex is east of East Norwessex, but they're both far north of Middlesex and West Norwex.

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

We have this conversation at least once a day in my apartment

"The slope will be 74° at ground level." "Okay, I think we can hack together a ... wait, why did they specify ground level? It's 74° everywhere, right? ... Oh no, there's a whole section in the treaty labeled 'curvature.'"

I hear once you've worked there for 256 days they teach you the secret of levitation.

My all-time favorite example of syntactic ambiguity comes from Wikipedia: 'Charlotte's Web is a children's novel by American author E. B. White, about a pig named Wilbur who is saved from being slaughtered by an intelligent spider named Charlotte.'

To detect dark matter, we just need to build a bird feeder that spins two squirrels around the rim in opposite directions at relativistic speeds and collides them together.

The only winning move is to play, perfectly, waiting for your opponent to make a mistake.

Update: It turns out the cannon has a motorized base, and can make holes just fine using the barrel itself as a battering ram. But due to design constraints it won't work without a projectile loaded in, so we still need those drills.

Following this, the pong paddle went on a mission to destroy Atari headquarters and, due to a mixup, found himself inside the game The Matrix Reloaded. Boy, was THAT ever hard to explain to him.

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

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!

Every age: "I'm glad I'm not the clueless person I was five years ago, but now I don't want to get any older."

Lot of drama in those days, including constant efforts to force the "Reflections on Trusting Trust" guy into retirement so we could stop being so paranoid about compilers.

To motivate it to fire its harpoons hard enough, Rosetta's Philae lander has been programmed to believe it is trying to kill the comet.

Water is thinner than both, and fire is *definitely* thicker.

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.

HOW ABOUT A NICE GAME OF STRIP GLOBAL THERMONUCLEAR WAR?

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

If you think this is too hard on literary criticism, read the Wikipedia article on deconstruction.

YOU THINK THIS IS FUNNY?

Statistics suggest that there should be tons of alien encounter stories, and in practice there are tons of alien encounter stories. This is known as Fermi's Lack-of-a-Paradox.

Plus, when someone finally grabs your glasses and stomps on them, it costs way less than $1,500 to replace them.

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

Hello and welcome to Millibar Millibarn Attometer, an advice show for the Planck era.

Oh no, I haven't checked in with Yvonne in YEARS.

You may notice the first half of these instructions are similar to the instructions for a working nuclear fusion device. After the first few dozen steps, be sure to press down firmly and fold quickly to overcome fusion pressure.

I can't get over the suspicion that all those viral pictures are photoshopped and 'Flemish' belongs in the lower right circle.

I tell my children 'it's not whether you win or lose, it's how you play the game.' I'm trying to take the edge off their competitive drive to ensure that I can always beat them.

I spent more time trying to get an audible.com audio book playing than it took to listen to the book. I have lost every other piece of DRM-locked music I have paid for.

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

This was actually wish #406. Wish #2 was for him to lose the ability to remember that each new wish wasn't my first.

Now that airlines have started adding wheel locks to their drink carts, less than half of flights have one accidentally fall out through the hole.

It was the funniest 6.5 seconds of my life, although as usual like 80% of it was just Tom and Ray's gasping, hacking laughter.

Your manuscript "Don't Pay $25 to Access Any of the Articles in this Journal: A Review of Preprint Repositories and Author Willingness to Email PDF Copies for Free" has also been rejected, but nice try.

Can't and shouldn't.

"I've noticed you physics people can be a little on the reductionist side." "That's ridiculous. Name ONE reductionist word I've ever said."

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

My theory is that most humans have been colonized with alien mind-control slugs that hold the earbuds for them, and the ones who can't wear earbuds are the only surviving free ones.

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

The pile gets soaked with data and starts to get mushy over time, so it's technically recurrent.

U+FDD0 is actually Unicode for the eye of the basilisk, though for safety reasons no font actually renders it.

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

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

And that's *another* crypto conference I've been kicked out of. C'mon, it's a great analogy!

Listen, you need to get over your reluctance to permanently alter a game. Now roll 2d6 to determine how many ounces of soda to spill into the box.

Directions from CITY OF TROY to ITHACA / Total time: 10y 54d 14h 25m / Warning: Route crosses an international border / route includes capture by the goddess Calypso / route includes a ferry

I hear many of you finally have smooth Flash support, but me and my Intel card are still waiting on a kernel patch somewhere in the pipeline before we can watch Jon Stewart smoothly.

I read in this one article that the breaking of electroweak symmetry is the reason we have SOULS. This guy with a degree said so!

We've almost finished constructing the piña collider.

It's just that I get nervous about heights.

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

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

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.

And given how much of my stuff they go through, they definitely know where I live.

Under the 'has cleared its orbital neighborhood' and 'fuses hydrogen into helium' definitions, thanks to human activities Earth technically no longer qualifies as a planet but DOES count as a star.

Hey, are you friends with any hamsters? This kite needs a passenger.

I have a thing for corrupt women.

WARNING: This item was aged by the same inexorable passage of time that also processes nuts.

It's okay, we can just feed the one-pixel image into an AI upscaler and recover the original image, or at least one that's just as cool.

There are some papers arguing that there's a volcanic component, but I personally think they're just feeling guilty and trying to cover the trail.

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

[20 minutes later] ", hi."

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

Blown into prime factors

I want this engraved on my tombstone like the Epitaph of Stevinus.

I also have an utterance. Less of an utterance and more of an incantation. Less of an incantation and more of a malediction. Less of a malediction and more of a Word of Power. Less of a Word of Power and more of an Unforgivable Curse.

Also, after all the warnings about filling in the bubbles completely, I spent like 30 seconds on each one.

Bonus points if you can identify the science in question

Certain hybrid events can only happen in certain locations where all the conditions are present; chasers flock to the area in and around Kansas known as tumbleweed-colliding-with-possum alley.

Nowadays the only ones left that do anything are turtles.

Hint: If you ever encounter this puzzle in a crossword app, just [term for someone with a competitive and high-achieving personality].

The only big difference I've seen is in colors. Where the regular text reads 'press red button', the braille reads 'press two-inch button'.

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

Attention all passengers: This is an express sequence to infinity. If your stop is not a power of two, please disembark now.

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.

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

Hey, why stop at our house? We could burn down ALL these houses for the insurance money.

We're firing you, but the online headline-writing division wants to hire you.

'And hypnotize someone into thinking they've uploaded it and passed it around.' 'But then won't the uploader get suspicious that it pauses at 301+ for a while? Why don't we just forge the number entirel--' ::BLAM:: 'The Council of 299 is adjourned.'

Gonna feel even dumber when I realize that all this time he's been talking into a bluetooth thingy and we're not actually friends.

According to a new paper published in the journal Science, reporters are unable to thrive in an arsenic-rich environment.

It'd be great if some news network started featuring partisan hack talking heads who were all Federalists and Jacksonians, just to see how long it took us to catch on.

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!

Who knew you could learn so much about sexual reproduction from looking at pictures on the internet!

"That last LinkedIn request set a new record for the most energetic physical event ever observed. Maybe we should respond." "Nah."

Brains aside, I wonder how many poorly-written xkcd.com-parsing scripts will break on this title (or ;;"''{<<[' this mouseover text."

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

The good news is that according to the latest IPCC report, if we enact aggressive emissions limits now, we could hold the warming to 2°C. That's only HALF an ice age unit, which is probably no big deal.

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

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

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

Our customers keep sending us their personal information, even though we've repeatedly asked them to stop. The EU told me I'm the heir to some ancient European throne that makes me exempt from the GDPR, but we should probably still try to fix that.

Don't turn it on.

You'd think it'd be easy to just bet money against these people, but you have to consider the probability of them paying up.

I hate the unearthly sound my phone makes when the weather service issues a tornado harbinger.

We'll turn the asteroid belt into ball bearings to go between different rings orbiting at different speeds.

At this point, if we're going to keep insisting on portraying dinosaurs as featherless because it's "cooler", it's time to apply that same logic to art involving bald eagles.

I wonder what percentage of not-obviously-busy people on the street would say yes to kite-flying with a stranger. This looks like a job for Science!

That was quicker than usual! The cabin's sprinkler system often makes it really hard to keep anything lit.

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

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

It can take a site a while to figure out that there's a problem with their 'report a bug' form.

This was an actual mock conversation between me and a friend at TGiF. The waitress walked up around panel 5 and was somewhat put off.

A good lifehack is to use messy and unstable systems to organize your photos. That way, every five years or so it becomes obsolete and/or collapses, and you have to open it up and pick only your favorite pictures to salvage.

If you see two numbers but they're both the same and you have to squint to read them, you have synesthesia, colorblindness, diplopia, and myopia.

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

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

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

The rope keeps breaking, I'm covered in bruises and scrapes, and I've barely reached the end of my driveway, but I don't care--I'm determined to become the first person to commute to work by tetherball.

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

I always felt like what the 'you are now aware of your tongue' thing needed in order to be truly enjoyable was an element of mortal peril.

If a materials scientist gives you a present, always ask whether regifting will incur any requirements for Federal paperwork.

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.

The bunch of disadvantaged kids I was tutoring became too good at writing, and their essays were forcing me to confront painful existential questions, so I started trying to turn them on to drugs and crime instead.

Apparently Google assumes you're traveling during the ferry's normal operating hours. We lost two hours circling that damn lake (to say nothing of the Straw Man).

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

Sure, you could just ask, but this also takes care of the host gift thing.

The company started out exploiting a loophole in the law banning scooters. The city was mad at first, but then they noticed how much they were saving on street cleaning.

Roger Ebert once called you directionless and unwatchable.

There's also a unicode-handling bug in the URL request library, and we're storing the passwords unsalted ... so if we salt them with emoji, we can close three issues at once!

Premature optimization is the root of all evil, so to start this project I'd better come up with a system that can determine whether a possible optimization is premature or not.

It can't be very MUCH money ... they apparently can't even afford a sampler. I mean, with a little remixing, some of this could be kinda good!

I don't even *want* this package! Why did I join the stinging insect of the month club, anyway?

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.

It's a long way down.

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

So he's saying that God thought Hitler's art was so bad that the Holocaust was an acceptable alternative. It's no secret that the hat guy is closely based on Aram, from Men in Hats.

"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."

And they choose Al Gore as Internet Secretary.

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

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!

Help, I set my white balance wrong and suddenly everyone is screaming at each other about whether they've been to Colorado.

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

Ultra-Serial Violet C light is unpolarized, so you don't have to flip the polarizing filter over when you get the orientation wrong the first time.

100he100k out th1s 1nno5at4e str1ng en100o501ng 15e been 500e5e50op1ng! 1t's 6rtua100y perfe100t! ...hang on, what's a "virtuacy"?

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.

The next day: 'What? Six bank robberies!? But I just vandalized the library!' 'Nice try. They saw your plate with all the 1's and I's.' 'That's impossible! I've been with my car the whole ti-- ... wait. Ok, wow, that was clever of her.'

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

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

Hobby: seeing how many menu selections you can get someone to go through before they realize you're not an automated system and/or hang up.

Tired of waiting on hold? Use our website to chat with one of our live agents, who are available to produce words at you 24/7!

Real programmers set the universal constants at the start such that the universe evolves to contain the disk with the data they want.

Menu -> Manage -> [Optimize space usage, Encrypt disk usage report, Convert photos to text-only, Delete temporary files, Delete permanent files, Delete all files currently in use, Optimize menu options, Download cloud, Optimize cloud , Upload unused space to cloud]

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

I would be honored, but I know I don't belong in your network. The person you invited was someone who had not yet inflicted this two-year ordeal upon you. I'm no longer that person.

Really, the comforting side in most conspiracy theory arguments is the one claiming that anyone who's in power has any plan at all.

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

James suggested this, and I have to agree. It'd be much worse.

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

I'M PLUGGING IN MY PHONE BUT THE BATTERY ON THE SCREEN ISN'T CHARGING

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

The LINACs in the glasses frames can barely manage one MeV. You should've gone to the screening at CERN.

Strictly speaking, 'violin' refers to the internal structure of the data. The external portion visible in the plot is called the 'viola.'

"That's ... unsettling." "Yeah, those definitely don't sound like the normal drea– ＬＡＴＩＴＵＤＥＴＨＲＥＥＦＩＶＥＰＯＩＮＴ..."

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.

[title-text similarly alphabetized]

[*disables social networking accounts*] [*social isolation increases*] Wait, why does this ALSO feel bad?

I was actually a little relieved when I learned that JPEG2000 was used in the DCI digital cinema standard. I was feeling so bad for it!

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

At first I was making fun of them, but joke's on me--the deer is surprisingly ergonomic, except for the kicks.

Arboretum Owner Denied Standing in Garden Path Suit on Grounds Grounds Appealing Appealing

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.

In the Hall of the Mountain King was accidentally composed on log/log paper.

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.

Some tires are marketed as 'all-shape tires,' but if driven in a climate with both inverted catenary falls and triangle falls, they wear out really fast.

It traveled so far to reach me. I owed it my best.

And nothing for 'I'm glad I saw Epic Movie.'

In contrast to the deep booming sound associated with the cannon in pop culture depictions, recent studies show it actually made more of a 'toot toot!' noise.

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

Thanks to differences in logging regulations, the messages actually turned out to be visible from the air.

The list includes polio, Guinea worm, and this one particular enterovirus strain that they've been tracking out of spite after it went around the lab a few years ago.

Concealed mostly beneath the surface, sharks are the icebergs of the sea.

'Baby Got Back' turned 20 this year. My favorite nostalgia show is VH1's 'I Love The Inexorable March of Time Toward the Grave That Awaits Us All.'

We will have an entire wing of the library devoted to copies of book #26, because ohmygod it's the one where Jake and Cassie finally KISS!!!

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.

Using a reflective wall in a game to give one shot two chances to hit is called a double-tapetum lucidum.

A lot of sentences undergo startling shifts in mood if you add 'like this one' to the end, but high on the list is 'I'm a neurologist studying dreams.'

If we can destroy enough of the lights in our region, we may see more comets, but that's a risk we'll have to take.

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

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.

See also: Farm animals and dinosaurs. I am so confident that there exists children's media that involves dinosaurs driving trucks on a farm that I'm writing this without even Googling to check.

m-x machineofdeath-mode

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

The graph is of the magnitude of the function with the real value between 0 and 2 and the imaginary between about 35 and 40. I've misplaced the exact parameters I used.

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.

The Earth is, on average, located in the habitable zone, but at any given time it has a certain probability of being outside it, which is why life exists on Earth but is mortal.

My first words were 'These were my first words; what were yours?'

Saying 'what kind of an idiot doesn't know about the Yellowstone supervolcano' is so much more boring than telling someone about the Yellowstone supervolcano for the first time.

The TempurPedic wineglass guy broke his ankle.

[Shortly thereafter, at a nearby bakery] ::CRASH:: ::RUMBLE:: ::VRRRRRR:: '... I don't know, officer. It just scooped up an entire rack of scones and drove away!'

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

Sometimes I hate the internet. Sometimes it makes me happy that 'The Tubes' has become slang for the internet so quickly.

Backward-compatible with many existing cables, and can connect directly to phones or tablets if you press them down hard enough.

You're a turtle!

Welcome to the International Space Station Exclamation Point!

This is even better than my previous smartphone casemod: an old Western Electric Model 2500 desk phone handset complete with a frayed, torn-off cord dangling from it.

Implausible, did you say? Sorry, couldn't quite hear you from all the way up heeeeeeeeere!

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

Themistocles said his infant son ruled all Greece -- "Athens rules all Greece; I control Athens; my wife controls me; and my infant son controls her." Thus, nowadays the world is controlled by whoever buys advertising time on Dora the Explorer.

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

We are sexy, sexy Von Neumann machines.

I like trying to make it as hard as possible. "I'd love to meet up, maybe in a few days? Next week is looking pretty empty. *witchcraft"

I understand modern autogyros are much more stable, so I've probably angered the autogyro people by impugning their safety. Once they finish building the autogyros they've been working on in their garages for 10 years, they'll come after me.

"Mr. President, what if the unthinkable happens? What if the launch goes wrong, and Napoleon is not stranded on the Moon?" "Have Safire write up a speech."

At least we can all agree on the enormity of this usage.

Applying renormalization to bullies successfully transformed Pete & Pete's Endless Mike into Finite Mike.

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

"We can do 0.33 or 0.34, but our payroll software doesn't allow us to--" "NO DEAL."

As of this writing, Ubuntu 6.10 and Firefox 2.0 have left my computer a complete mess.

I was fired by the National Weather Service five minutes after they hired me for going into their code base and renaming all the tornado warnings to "tornado spoiler alerts."

It's always bothered me that you can't cancel out an inverter by putting a second inverter after it.

Oh no, my marshmallow became tidally locked!

2078: He announces that he's finally making the jump from screen+irssi to tmux+weechat.

v3.0.2: Hey, if anyone still using this app is headed to the beach, can you stop at 4th and River St and grab the sunscreen from my car? Trunk should be unlocked. Thanks!

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

Hey, so did you ever finish your video series about Cassie and the caterpillar morph? I loved the first three, but never ... no, sorry, I get it, this isn't the place. Sorry! Sorry.

*refresh* Aww, still in Kalamazoo. *refresh* Aww, still in Kalamazoo.

1,300,000-1,400,000 ft: Ask a crew member to show you how to use the ISS food warmer.

Don't forget to add another term for "probability that the Modified Bayes' Theorem is correct."

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

I wonder what year I'll discard the last weird food item that I bought online in early 2020.

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

Ooh, another one. Uh ... the ability to alter any coefficients of friction at will during sporting events.

ERRORS: HAIR JAM. COLOR-SAFE CONDITIONER CARTRIDGE RUNNING LOW. LEGAL-SIZE HAIR TRAY EMPTY, USING LETTER-SIZE HAIR ONLY.

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.

My hobby: Pretending to miss the sarcasm when people show off their lack of interest in football by talking about 'sportsball' and acting excited to find someone else who's interested, then acting confused when they try to clarify.

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

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

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

"Symbolic integration" is when you theatrically go through the motions of finding integrals, but the actual result you get doesn't matter because it's purely symbolic.

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

If the flyers don't work, we'll switch to the LEAST subtle method of informing a town of the existence of a trebuchet club.

SMS is just the worst, but I'm having trouble convincing people to adopt my preferred system, TLS IRC with a local server and a patched DOSBox gateway running in my mobile browser.

You've got questions, we've got assumptions.

Thomas Jefferson thought that every law and every constitution should be torn down and rewritten from scratch every nineteen years--which means X is overdue.

Don't you know? The chances of a random object being a scone are about one in six.

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

This reminds me of that video where ... no? How have you not seen that? Oh man, let me find it. No, it's ok, we can go back to your video later.

If that's too easy, you could try joining Tautology Club, which meets on the date of the Tautology Club meeting.

Life goal #29 is to get enough of them rejected that I can publish a comparative analysis of the rejection letters.

We were going to try swordfighting, but all my compiling is on hold.

"Ow! One of the petri dishes I left on the tower railing fell and hit me on the head! Hey, that gives me an idea..."

The other half has some cool shipwrecks, rocks, and snakes, but if you move those out of the way, it also has more sky.

Okay, this eclipse will only be visible from the Arctic in February 2063, when the sun is below the horizon, BUT if we get lucky and a gigantic chasm opens in the Earth in just the right spot...

Could be worse. In some towns north of here, it's already December, and the 21st will last for nearly a week.

It has so many advantages--it preserves Martian life, requires fewer interplanetary launches, and makes it much easier to field-test Mars rovers.

The third row will probably have to wait until 2034, and maybe longer. If I see a daytime supernova, I'll replace the meteor storm with that and consider it 3/3.

It's okay, they can figure out which control positions produce scalding water via a trial-and-error feedback loop with a barely-perceptible 10-second lag.

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

Although right now I'm more excited about ESPRESSO's radial velocity measurements, so I'm listening to This Kiss, her song about measuring "centrifugal motion" on "a rooftop under the sky".

There's Livejournal drama between those who want to wear human suits over fursuits and those who just take off the fursuits.

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.

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

If you must know, I'm currently researching how to save this emailed tax form as a regular PDF so I can print and sign it. Our work isn't a lock for the Nobel, but we're in the running.