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

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

Normally pronounced 'THEH-buh-kon', I assume.

Both too cautious AND not cautious enough: "I'm skeptical that those are aliens, so I'm going to try pulling off their masks."

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

Our nucleic acid recovery techinques found a great deal of homo sapiens DNA incorporated into the fossils, particularly the ones containing high levels of resin, leading to the theory that these dinosaurs preyed on the once-dominant primates.

I don't get it. The peak acceleration for passengers was WAY lower than in the giant-waterslide-loop-the-loop incident the other cruise line fired me for.

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

Phil Plait once pointed out that you can calculate the total angular area of the sky this way. If the sky is a sphere with radius 57.3 degrees, then its area is 4*pi*r^2=41,253 square degrees. This makes dimensional analysts SO mad, but you can't argue with results.

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

A helicopter bursts from a chrysalis and alights on a rock, rotors still damp.

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

Careful mathematical analysis demonstrates small-scale irregularities in Gaussian distribution

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.

I find that when someone's taking time to do something right in the present, they're a perfectionist with no ability to prioritize, whereas when someone took time to do something right in the past, they're a master artisan of great foresight.

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

Strangely, they still celebrate by eating hot dogs. Since they don't have mouths, they just kinda toss them in the air and let them fall back down into their propeller blades. It's pretty messy.

The discovery of a fully typographical star system comes with a big asterisk.

All our teams make an effort to stay optimistic, but I will say that once our virus division saw the vaccine efficacy data, they started asking for payment up front.

I found an old tape of this episode in my family's closet. Check the news section of the forums to see the clip!

I'm trying to be healthier, so after I eat this brick of cheese, I'll have a spoonful of grease-soaked vegetables.

Dear editors of Homeopathy Monthly: I have two small corrections for your July issue. One, it's spelled "echinacea", and two, homeopathic medicines are no better than placebos and your entire magazine is a sham.

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

Their crash investigation team had some particularly harsh words for Dave Matthews.

If you can't get your graphing tool to do the shading, just add some clip art of cosmologists discussing the unusual curvature of space in the area.

'The monospaced-typewriter-font story is a COMPLETE FABRICATION! WAKE UP, SHEEPLE' 'It doesn't matter! Studies support single spaces!' 'Those results weren't statistically significant!' 'Fine, you win. I'm using double spaces right now!' 'Are not! We can all hear your stupid whitespace.'

Ingress: Foursquare With Space Noises.

The worst is the Terrible Twos, when they're always throwing things and shrieking, "forsooth, to bed thou shalt not take me, cur!"

As far as "being in the pocket of Big Egg" goes, I think the real threat is Chansey.

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.

"10 minutes ago we were down to only 2 0s!" "How many do we have now?" "I ... don't know!!"

This scavenger hunt is getting boring. Let's go work on the treehouse!

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.

I still don't understand why the Sun paid the extra money for Transitions lenses.

If androids someday DO dream of electric sheep, don't forget to declare sheepCount as a long int.

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

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.

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

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

I was going to record an album with that cover under the name "PINK FTFY", so it'd come after them on the store CD rack. But at this point music stores are just rooms where CDs are set out to age before they're thrown away, so probably nobody would see it.

I had a hard time with Ayn Rand because I found myself enthusiastically agreeing with the first 90% of every sentence, but getting lost at 'therefore, be a huge asshole to everyone.'

If you closely examine the cosmic background radiation, you can pick up lingering echoes of 'I Got You Babe'.

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

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

I'm inside your head and I hate it. Please let me out.

By the third trimester, there will be hundreds of babies inside you.

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.

True story: I had to try several times to upload this comic because my ssh key was blacklisted.

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

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

Don't worry, the dogs are all fine. That's actually kind of the problem.

Just pretend you're kidding.

The ten-year cancerversary is traditionally the Cursed Artifact Granting Immortality anniversary.

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.

We actually stand around the antivirus displays with the Mac users just waiting for someone to ask.

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.

You can find a perfect correlation if you just control for the residual.

Plus they take like 9%.

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

They rounded down to 182.8 instead of rounding up to 182.9 because 182.9 might make the statement incorrect.

You know that asteroid that almost destroyed Earth in the 90s? Turns out the whole thing was secretly created by Michael Bay, who then PAID Bruce Willis and Ben Affleck to look heroic while blowing it up!

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.'

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

At first I thought I would need some gold or something to pay him, but then I realized that it was the 18th century and I could just bring a roll of aluminum foil.

Knuth Paper-Stack Notation: Write down the number on pages. Stack them. If the stack is too tall to fit in the room, write down the number of pages it would take to write down the number. THAT number won't fit in the room? Repeat. When a stack fits, write the number of iterations on a card. Pin it to the stack.

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

'Why don't you just point it at their eye directly?' 'What is this, 2007?'

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.

"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.'"

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.

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

The investor elevator pitch is "Wheeeeeeee! Elevators are fun!"

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.

IT'S ALL REAL

Cyanobacteria wiped out nearly all life on Earth once before, and they can do it again!

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

I ADMIRE HOW YOU SET BOUNDARIES AND I HOPE YOUR COLLEAGUES RESPECT THEM! PLEASE SPARE MY LIFE!

'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.

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.

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

This white-balance illusion hit so hard because it felt like someone had been playing through the Monty Hall scenario and opened their chosen door, only to find there was unexpectedly disagreement over whether the thing they'd revealed was a goat or a car.

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

As they're both unplugged, they do a lovely Daisy Daisy/Still Alive duet.

I love Eileen / and want you to love her / When you're around / I'm one floor above her / If you could see / just how much I adore her / Oh, that pretty red dress / I'd do anything for her / (Too ra loo ra too ra loo rye ayy)

The Piña Colada song carves a trajectory across the chart over the course of the song.

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.

If a wild bun is sighted, a nice gesture of respect is to send a 'BUN ALERT' message to friends and family, with photographs documenting the bun's location and rank. If no photographs are possible, emoji may be substituted.

Due to a minor glitch, 'discharge patient' does not cause the algorithm to exit, but instead leads back to 'hunt down and capture patient'.

Refs generally say that you can exercise enough altitude control to avoid the ground, but if you start strategically choosing air layers to steer yourself, that's traveling.

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

For sentimental reasons, every active Mars rover is counted as one person, although that's not enough to make Mars more than a dot.

Novel ideas and cool explosions are both good, but what I really want from a movie is novel ideas ABOUT cool explosions.

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.

Hello, island

On one hand, you'll never be able to convince your parents to switch. On the other hand, you'll never be able to convince your parents to switch!

It beat out 'Clock radio alarm', 'B-flat at 194 decibels', 'That noise from Dumb & Dumber', and 'Recording of a sobbing voice begging you to answer'.

In ordering #5, self-driving cars will happily drive you around, but if you tell them to drive to a car dealership, they just lock the doors and politely ask how long humans take to starve to death.

Sometimes the best fun looks like boredom.

Oh God, the tornado picked up snakes!

Type IIII error: Mistaking tally marks for Roman numerals

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

Prediction for Carlsen v. Anand: ... 25. Qb8+ Nxb8 26. Rd8# f6 27. "... dude." Qf5 28. "The game is over, dude." Qxg5 29. Rxe8 0-1 30. "Dude, your move can't be '0-1'. Don't write that down." [Black flips board]

Our experts have characterized the ecological impact of this trend as "adorable."

The local police, growing increasingly concerned about this church, ask parishioners to take a sip of wine and then spit it back out for DNA testing. It's blood, and it matches a 1970s murder victim.

It's kinda Zen when you think about it, if you don't think too hard.

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

Plot twist: Thanks to [mumble mumble] second-order [mumble] Rayleigh-Taylor [mumble] turbulent [mumble] shear, it turns out powered flight is way EASIER on Mars!

We actually divorced once over the airplane/treadmill argument. (Preemptive response to the inevitable threads arguing about it: you're all wrong on the internet.)

Actually, I think if all higher math professors had to write for the Simple English Wikipedia for a year, we'd be in much better shape academically.

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

The presents under the tree are actually a single gift connected by an underground ribbon system.

Medium: Pencil on paper

The academic archaeology establishment is suppressing my breakthroughs because of the disruption it would bring to their prepared-core flake-based toolmaking industry.

Maybe I haven't been to Iceland because I'm busy dealing with YOUR crummy code.

<A>: Like </a>this.

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

Fortunately, the charging one has been solved now that we've all standardized on mini-USB. Or is it micro-USB? Shit.

Awww.

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

I'm looking forward to having to worry a lot less about covid, but wouldn't mind if we worried a little more about giving each other colds. Colds are bad!

Rome's declaration of war against Carthage was sent from a no-reply address, so Hannibal had to cross the Alps to deliver his "UNSUBSCRIBE" response in person.

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

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.

The best place to be for a hug eclipse is a scenic natural area with good views and few clouds. The worst place to be is the lunar surface.

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

Presented in partnership with Qualcomm, Craigslist, Whirlpool, Hostess, LifeStyles, and the US Chamber of Commerce. Manufactured on equipment which also processes peanuts. Price includes 2-year Knicks contract. Phone may extinguish nearby birthday candles. If phone ships with Siri, return immediately; do not speak to her and ignore any instructions she gives. Do not remove lead casing. Phone may attract/trap insects; this is normal. Volume adjustable (requires root). If you experience sudden tingling, nausea, or vomiting, perform a factory reset immediately. Do not submerge in water; phone will drown. Exterior may be frictionless. Prolonged use can cause mood swings, short-term memory loss, and seizures. Avert eyes while replacing battery. Under certain circumstances, wireless transmitter may control God.

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.

Building Inspectors HATE This One Weird Trick

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

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

When charged particles of more than 5 TeV pass through a bubble chamber, they leave a trail of candy.

If data fails the Teacher's t test, you can just force it to take the test again until it passes.

And the baby has a fever.

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.'

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.

It was bound to happen eventually. This data theft will enable almost limitless [xkcd.com/792]-style password reuse attacks in the coming weeks. There's only one group that comes out of this looking smart: Everyone who pirated Photoshop.

I dropped a bird and I didn't hear it hit bottom.

A good ²³⁸Umbrella policy should cover it.

The way out is to use the marker you have to add a box that says 'get a marker' to the line between you and 'start', then add a 'no' line from the trap box to 'end'.

'Ugh, I'm never going to be like spiders. My descendants will all just be normal arthropods who mind their own busines and don't do anything weird.' --The ancestor of a bunch of eusocial insects

I don't remember her name at all, but she fell asleep on the floor in front of me.

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

If you fire a Portal gun through the door of the wardrobe, space and time knot together, which leads to a frustrated Aslan trying to impart Christian morality to the Space sphere.

It's a real accomplishment to mess up a ravioli recipe badly enough that the resulting incident touches all four quadrants of the NFPA hazard diamond.

Neutral Evil is for people who like keeping the weight nicely centered in the carton, but also hate everyone else who wants that.

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

I have never been totally satisfied by the explanations for why e to the ix gives a sinusoidal wave.

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

Astrobiology is held back by the fact that we're all too nervous to try to balance on the ladder while holding an expensive microscope.

Yes, I mean she said that during sex. Yes, it was a little weird.

Unsafe vehicles, hills, and philosophy go hand in hand.

Also no results: 1girl10000cups, 2girls(5+3i)cups, 65536girls65536cups, or 3frenchhens2turtledoves1cup.

Though 100 years is longer than a lot of our resources.

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

Tomorrow's sessions will be entirely devoted to sewing machine rotary hooks.

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!

Small sewing machines are sewing machines that are smaller than a sewing machine. A sewing machine is larger than a small sewing machine, but quieter than a loud sewing machine.

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

A breadth-first search makes a lot of sense for dating in general, actually; it suggests dating a bunch of people casually before getting serious, rather than having a series of five-year relationships one after the other.

AAAAAA A ÃA̧AȂA̦ ǍÅÂÃĀÁȂ AAAAAAA!

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.

With the right 90-degree rotation, any effect is a side effect.

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

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

And then a second one, to drain the sea.

4. They unplug the root machine but the thousands of leaf VMs scatter in the wind and start spinning up new instances wherever they land

In lieu of mapping software, I once wrote a Perl program which, given a USB GPS receiver and a destination, printed 'LEFT' 'RIGHT' OR 'STRAIGHT' based on my heading.

Don't click on the wing.

Subway refuses to answer my questions about whether it's an International Footlong or a US Survey Footlong. A milligram of sandwich is at stake!

Look, I just think we need to stop coddling those hedonistic roundabout hogs who get into the inner lane and circle for hours, wasting valuable capacity.

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

I usually respond to someone else doing something good by figuring out a reason that they're not really as good as they seem. But I've been realizing lately that there's an easier way to handle these situations, and it involves zero internet arguments.

I'm going to drive this Netherlands joke so far into the ground they'll have to build levees around it to keep the sea out.

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

Problem Exists Between Leopard And Chair

DUCKLOOP'D?

The few dozen doors that have little Christmas trees on them are a nice touch.

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

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

[Dog returns with the end of a string in its mouth] [Voice drifts down from the sky] Kites are fun!

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

Yes, the cosmic microwave background is great, but what about the earthly microwave foreground?

Parents: talk to your kids about popup blockers. Also, at some point, sex. But crucial fundamentals first!

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 hear that these days Bill Watterson is happy just painting in the Ohio woods with his father and doesn't get any mail or talk to anyone.

Massage: Theoretical (10), Quantum (6), High-energy (2), Computational (1), Marine (1), Astro- (None)

Okay, I'm just gonna order pizza, and let's never talk about this again.

I think you mean 'GNU Info Override'.

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

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

It's time to draw the line.

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

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

Friends with detriments.

I know a lot of people hate these, but I prefer them to touchpads.

The less popular 8.8.4.4 is slated for discontinuation.

Man, I just wanted to know how babby was formed.

What if what *I* see as blue, *you* see as a slightly different blue because you're using Chrome instead of Firefox and despite a decade of messing with profiles we STILL can't get this right somehow.

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!!!

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.

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

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!

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.

Oh, weird, Amazon is out of butterfly nets.

Elon Musk finally blocked me from the internal Tesla repository because I wouldn't stop sending pull requests for my code supporting steering via vim keybindings.

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

Man, there's future *everywhere*.

To be fair, my job at NASA was working on robots and didn't actually involve any orbital mechanics. The small positive slope over that period is because it turns out that if you hang around at NASA, you get in a lot of conversations about space.

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

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

NOW INVENT AN IMPOSSIBLE-TO-TRANSLATE LANGUAGE AND USE IT TO TELL US WHERE THE MONEY IS.

They're continuing to search for a square with the same area as the circle, as efforts to construct one have run into difficulties.

This comic shows estimated average frequency. I wanted to include the pitch drop experiment, but it turns out the gif format has some issues with decade-long loops.

If you want to be extra safe, check that there's a big block of jumbled characters at the bottom.

I hope we can stop them

413 nanohertz, by the way.

He sees you when you're sleeping, he knows when you're awake, he's copied on /var/spool/mail/root, so be good for goodness' sake.

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

We're underwater on our mortgage thanks to the low price of water.

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

The film is set in 2018, but when Commander Bremberly chases the hologram through Times Square, there's a billboard for Avengers: Age of Ultron. Depending on the date, that billboard would have been advertising either Infinity War or this movie.

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.

Really, they'd be rushing around collecting revisions to go into the next scheduled quarterly public data update, not publishing them immediately, but you have to embellish things a little for Hollywood.

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

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

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

You spin me right round, baby, right round, in a manner depriving me of an inertial reference frame. Baby.

It sounds like a great way to make friends! Is it near that Friend Zone you keep talking about? I wanna go!

Let me look away and type 'guy who's just jealous that I beat all his MarioKart times' and turn back, and ... yup, there you are again!

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).

Don't expect any leniency on late fees, though.

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

Someday the 'in popular culture' section will have its own article with an 'in popular culture' section. It will reference this title-text referencing it, and the blogosphere will implode.

Did he just go crazy and jump out the window?

There are two or three songs out there with beeps in the chorus that sound exactly like the clock radio alarm I had in high school, and hearing it makes me think my life since junior year has been a dream I'm about to wake up from.

I had a really hard time not writing '... profit!'

I just noticed CVS has started stocking homeopathic pills on the same shelves with--and labeled similarly to--their actual medicine. Telling someone who trusts you that you're giving them medicine, when you know you’re not, because you want their money, isn’t just lying--it’s like an example you’d make up if you had to illustrate for a child why lying is wrong.

"Wait, how often are you getting bitten by snakes? And why are you boiling water?" "Dunno, the CDC people keep showing up with complicated questions about the 'history of the property' and 'possible curses' but I kinda tune them out. At least one of them offered me the flu shot."

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.

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

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

Guess who has two thumbs and spent the night in an ER after trying to rescue a kitten that ran under his car at a stoplight and climbed up into the engine compartment? And, thanks to antibiotics, will continue having two thumbs? THIS GUY. (P.S. kitten is safe!)

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

[hair in face] "SEVVVENNN YEEEARRRSSS"

RIP, Gary.

His books were kinda intimidating; rappelling down through his skylight seemed like the best option.

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

The creepy fingers that grow from a vibrating cornstarch-water mix can be modeled as a chain of inverted vertical pendulums (DOI:10.1039/c4sm00265b) and are believed to be the fingers of Maxwell's Demon trying to push through into our universe.

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.

But one of the regulars in the channel is a girl!

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

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

I once asked an NSA guy whether they'd broken RSA. And I know I can trust him, because I asked if he was lying to me and he said no.

I'd like 0.4608 apples, please.

The package weighs 7 kg 9 oz.

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

Sometimes, I sit on top of parking decks and watch the sun rise. I feel like I should have a guitar or something.

To prove you're human, please click all the number pairs that appear together in your Social Security number.

And I was kicked out of my March Madness pool because I wouldn't shut up about the evidence for NBA/ABA endosymbiosis.

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.

The most awkward part is when you have to pause to put on your shoes before you continue rolling out the door.

One of the things of bear spray says that, and I'm not one to disobey safety instructions, but there are no bears around here. Guess it's time for a camping trip where we leave lots of food out!

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

No, a hydroplane doesn't land on water--that's an aquaplane. A hydroplane is a plane that gets electric power from an onboard water reservoir with a tiny dam and turbines.

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

It seems wrong that Fruit by the Foot is only sold by weight or by number of rolls.

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

In retrospect, I shouldn't have used each layer of the OSI model as one of my horcruxes.

Dinosaur Cosmics

Starring Macaulay Culkin.

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]"

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

If you ever see the † dagger symbol with no unmatched footnote, it means the writer is saying the phrase while threatening you with a dagger.

Thank you to Katie Mack for teaching me about this effect, and to Janelle Shane for describing redshifts as 'like galaxies sinking into a pool of dilute blood,' which is how I'll see them from now on.

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

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

All in all, I give this year a C-. There were no aurora visible from my house and that comet evaporated. They'd better not cancel the 2017 eclipse.

Someday I just know I'm going to encounter a problem that requires 500 flashlights and 700 knives with weird holes in them, and on that day I won't be caught unprepared.

What's weirder is that muons turned out to be INCREDIBLY cute.

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

It may remain in equilibrium for some time, slowly growing, and then suddenly become significantly redder.

It all came flat-packed in Pandora's Box.

Hey, when you're done draining the syrup, just leave the hole, okay?

Since people rarely try to cut down cell phone towers, after millions of years, as cell phone towers have gotten more treelike, trees have started growing fake cell phone tower attachments and shiny gray bark to protect themselves. This is a standard textbook example of convergent evolution.

I guess if she accepted irrational realities, she'd hardly be my fantasy.

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

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

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

After initial tests created a series of large holes in the wall of the lab, the higher-power Scanning Tunneling Tennis Ball Microscope project was quickly shut down.

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

Force-choking the chicken.

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

Planets are turning out to be so common that to show all the planets in our galaxy, this chart would have to be nested in itself--with each planet replaced by a copy of the chart--at least three levels deep.

The flags were probably vaporized on impact, because we launched it before we had finished figuring out how to land. That makes sense from an engineering standpoint, but also feels like a metaphor.

58% of the state has gone into plaid.

It's important to teach yourself to feel responsible for random events, because with great responsibility comes great power. That's what my wise Uncle Ben told me right before he died; he might still be alive today if only I'd said rabbit rabbit that year!

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

Handy exam trick: when you know the answer but not the correct derivation, derive blindly forward from the givens and backward from the answer, and join the chains once the equations start looking similar. Sometimes the graders don't notice the seam.

Oh, and, uh, if the Russian government asks, that submarine was always there.

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

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

I call Rule 34 on Wolfram's Rule 34.

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

The only other Wikipedia vandalism that I would feel zero remorse about is editing the article on active US militia groups to replace "militia" with "fanclub".

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?

Volunteers needed for a study on transmission of urushiol from digital contact with thin strips of fibrous cellulose pulp.

You can arrange a pickup of your sword in Rivendell between the hours of noon and 7:00 PM.

Wishbone and the Illustrated Classics series have gotten me through every conversation I've ever had about Dickens, Treasure Island, The Anarchist's Cookbook, and Our Bodies, Ourselves.

The robot is pregnant. It isn't mine.

Protip: You can win every exchange just by being one level more precise than whoever talked last. Eventually, you'll defeat all conversational opponents and stand alone.

Merry Christmas from xkcd!

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.

During the most recent glacial maximum, it's believed that land bridges extended from the surfaces and connected several of the spheres together.

CONFLICT OF INTEREST STATEMENT: The authors hope these results are correct because we all want to be cool people who are good at science.

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.

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.)

This plan may sound appealing to people who know a little about the immune system, but the drawbacks are clear to people who know a lot about the immune system and also to people who don't know anything about it.

The Strong Collatz Conjecture states that this holds for any set of obsessively-hand-applied rules.

I guess it's also the right setting for pictures of the Moon at night.

Hey Rob, sorry it took me a while to get back to you! Sure, I'd love to see WALL-E opening weekend! Are you still doing that, or...?

Plus, now I know that I have risk factors for elbow dysplasia, heartworm, parvo, and mange.

Luckily, unlike in our previous study, we have no reason to believe Evangeline the Adulterator gained access to our stored doses.

Effect strength => [unstoppable] | Effect range => [2 miles] | Effect duration => [1 year]

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

Facebook defines relationships. 'Yeah, we would have broken up last night, but the net connection was down.'

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

For the IPv6 map just imagine the XP default desktop picture.

Fermions are weird about each other in a standoffish way. Integer-spin particles are weird about each other in a 'stand uncomfortably close while talking' kind of way.

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.

Better change the URL to 'https' before downloading.

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

The Atlantic is expanding at about 10 ppm (points per month).

Conveniently approximated as e+2, Pau is commonly known as the Devil's Ratio (because in the octal expansion, '666' appears four times in the first 200 digits while no other run of 3+ digits appears more than once.)

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

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

This is my four-digit PIN. It was passed down to me by my father, and someday I will pass it on to you. Unless we figure out how to update it, but that sounds complicated.

I'm so glad NASA let you take your phone to Mars!

Anadromous fish are more vulnerable in rivers, since the lack of salt means you can quickly crack passwords using rainbow trout tables.

I'm one of the few Instagram users who connects solely through the Unix 'talk' gateway.

You can search it if you want, but you may want to skip the memories of your mom.

'I'm nothing without you' is a fucked-up sentiment.

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

Not only is that terrible in general, but you just KNOW Billy's going to open the root present first, and then everyone will have to wait while the heap is rebuilt.

Though I do think the tiny vent on one of the boosters labeled "O-RING" is in poor taste.

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.

When you Google an error message and it gets no results, you can be pretty sure you've found a clue to the location of Martin's sword.

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.

And the journal is filled with all the things I'd say to her if I were nice like you. I burn it when it's full.

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

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

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

President Andrew Johnson once said, "If I am to be shot at, I want Gnome Ann to be in the way of the bullet."

The increasing number of graham crackers and chocolate bars in orbit has created a growing risk of Kessler s'mores.

We wrote our site in Linear A rather than Aksara Kawi because browser testing showed that Crete script rendered faster than Java script.

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

'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.'

'Hey, everyone, you can totally trust that I didn't do a word count on MY edit!'

In the final vote, the doubters were won over by the strength of the name IMMUNION.

Blown into prime factors

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.

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

We've tested it on 30 different days and it hasn't gotten one wrong yet.

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

If it falls below 20% full, my bag turns red and I start to panic.

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

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

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.

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

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.

I built a model that combines local case rates and vaccination stats to estimate when it's reasonable to attend various types of party, but I forgot to include anything about where to find them.

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

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

YEEEEEEAAAAAAHHHHHH!

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

When I began trying to form a new claim by stitching together these parts in such an unnatural way, some called me mad.

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

...wait until they type in payment information, then use it to order yourself a replacement phone.

The social media reaction to this asteroid announcement has been sharply negative. Care to respond?

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

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

So I'm a bad person.

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

Hell if I know

Can you pass the nackle?

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

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!

The 8th panel is my favorite

But we don't need to worry about the boiling masses sandwiching the thin layer in which we live, since we're so fragile and short-lived that it's unlikely to kill us before something else does! Wait, why doesn't that sound reassuring?

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.

'Cheater!' 'Hey, gaming on wifi? You have only yourself to blame.'

We carefully sampled the general population and found that most people are familiar with acquiescence bias.

'Tin pest' makes more sense to me. Tin just doesn't want to be locked down in a shape like that. I get it. But why would any metal want to grow hair??

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

I'm pretty sure I've logged more hours in Google Maps over the past decade than in any game.

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.'

Fire is actually a potential biosignature, since it means something is filling the atmosphere with an unstable gas like oxygen. If we find a planet covered in flames, it might be an indicator that it supports life. Or used to, anyway, before the fire.

Staple guns: because duct tape can't make that 'kaCHUNK' noise.

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.

Both arXiv and archive.org are invaluable projects which, if they didn't exist, we would dismiss as obviously ridiculous and unworkable.

"Oh, you're using their Chrome APP, not their Chrome EXTENSION. They're very similar but one handles window creation differently." is a thing I hope I can stop saying soon.

Haunted Halloween masks from a mysterious costume shop that turn you evil and grow into your skin score a surprisingly high 80% filtration efficiency in R. L. Stine-sponsored NIOSH tests.