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

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Ok, but make sure to get lots of pieces of rock, because later we'll decide to stay in a room on our regular orb and watch hammers hold themselves and hit rocks for us, and they won't bring us very many rocks.

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.

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.

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...

The xkcd Survey: Big Data for a Big Planet

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!

The plug fits really snugly, so it should be safe in a crash.

"Buddy, you trying to pull something? I can't buy this gold--all the electrons are missing. I could face serious charges!"

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

Forever comparing, never evaluating on any external scale. If you were a sort function, you'd never break the nlogn barrier.

I had some important research to do on proposed interstellar space missions, basketball statistics, canceled skyscrapers, and every article linked from "Women in warfare and the military in the 19th century."

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

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

Well, for some value of 'actually work'.

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

"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!"

Stephen Douglas actually died soon after the debates and election, but if you demand historical accuracy in your webcomics you should be reading Hark! A Vagrant.

A term coined by my friend Beth

Every computer, at the unreachable memory address 0x-1, stores a secret. I found it, and it is that all humans ar-- SEGMENTATION FAULT.

CLIMAX is good, but SEXCLIMAX is even better.

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

A universe that needed someone to observe it in order to collapse it into existence would be a pretty sorry universe indeed.

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

Update: Santa has been destroyed by the range safety officer.

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

And on the pedestal these words appear: "And on the pedestal these words appear: "And on the pedestal these words appear: "And ...

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

In this situation, gzip /dev/inside to deflate, then pipe the compressed air to /dev/input to clean your keyboard. Avert your eyes when you do.

If you tune out again, when you tune back in you'll be hearing about dusty plasma fission fragment rockets.

This site requires Sun Java 6.0.0.1 (32-bit) or higher. You have Macromedia Java 7.3.8.1¾ (48-bit). Click here [link to java.com main page] to download an installer which will run fine but not really change anything.

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

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.

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

Out in a field, not another car for miles, silence but for the rain drumming on the sunroof, warm thick folds of the blanket hiding wordless fingertip games ...

Someday, some big historical event will happen during the DST changeover, and all the tick-tock articles chronicling how it unfolded will have to include a really annoying explanation next to their timelines.

Problem Exists Between Leopard And Chair

Cue letters from anthropology majors complaining that this view of numerolinguistic development perpetuates a widespread myth. They get to write letters like that because when you're not getting a real science degree you have a lot of free time. Zing!

The real loser in an argument about the meaning of the word 'hoverboard' is anyone who leaves that argument on foot.

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.

After my absent-mindedness resulted in a bad posterboard-related stomachache, I learned to do the sign-making place last.

YOU THINK THIS IS FUNNY?

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

It's not just time zones and leap seconds. SI seconds on Earth are slower because of relativity, so there are time standards for space stuff (TCB, TGC) that use faster SI seconds than UTC/Unix time. T2 - T1 = [God doesn't know and the Devil isn't telling.]

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

I once made an anniversary card for my then-girlfriend with this layout.

Our brains have just one scale, and we resize our experiences to fit.

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

FYI, it turns out "...because I haven't figured out whether he would be my brother-in-law or not" does NOT qualify as a "reason why these two should not be wed."

This well-known effect has of course been replicated in countless experiments.

You'd think the most expensive part would be the quark-gluon plasma chamber, but it's actually usually the tube to the top of the atmosphere to carry the cosmic rays down.

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

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

You didn't run a chemical analysis against the Shroud of Turin? Man, all that work for NOTHING.

Every Roomba needs a dueling harness.

Space-time is like some simple and familiar system which is both intuitively understandable and precisely analogous, and if I were Richard Feynman I'd be able to come up with it.

I vaguely and irrationally resent how useful WebPlotDigitizer is.

The Fujita Scale was replaced by the Enhanced Fujita Scale in 2007, but I think 'EF-5' sounds stupid, so I vote we just use the new measurements for assigning numbers but still call them 'F-whatever'.

I'll be honest--the 1950s were a rough time for cycling.

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

In the 90s, our variety radio station used the tagline "the best music of the 70s, 80s, and 90s." After 2000, they switched to "the best music of the 80s, 90s, and today." I figured they'd change again in 2010, but it's 2017 and they're still saying "80s, 90s, and today." I hope radio survives long enough for us to find out how they deal with the 2020s.

Although maybe it's just a phase, like freshman year of college when I realized I could just buy frosting in a can.

Wikipedia trivia: if you take any article, click on the first link in the article text not in parentheses or italics, and then repeat, you will eventually end up at "Philosophy".

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

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!

10^13.4024: A person who has come back to numbers after a journey deep into some random theoretical field

Officer suspended from horse.

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

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.

A solid red area with two white lines means that you have been infected with the anti-coronavirus, COVID+19, which will cure anyone you have close contact with.

I make tools for managing job-hunting sites for people who make tools for managing job-hunting sites for people who make tools for ...

Arguably, the '1/2' in the drag equation is purely decorative, since drag coefficients are already unitless and could just as easily be half as big. Some derivations give more justification for the extra 1/2 than others, but one textbook just calls it 'a traditional tribute to Euler and Bernoulli.'

Ugh, it's stuck to my laptop. It must have bound to the ACER-2 receptor.

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 phone will be collected by the toll operators and mailed back to you within 4-6 weeks.

Starring Macaulay Culkin.

If you fund my Kickstarter ...

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.

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

I've looked at clouds from both sides now.

We can do this.

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.

The projection's north pole is in a small lake on the island of Mahé in the Seychelles, which is off the top of the map and larger than the rest of the Earth's land area combined.

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

Well, sex is like a velociraptor: despite your movie-fueled lifelong neurotic obsession, unlikely to be found in your house.

After reading Slashdot and BoingBoing, sometimes I have to go outside.

It may be a fundamentally empty experience, but holy crap the Droid's 265 ppi screen is amazing.

"The parasitism might be mediated by a fungus!" exclaimed the biologist who was trying to ruin Christmas again.

You know what they say: mRNA-1273 before tozinameran, you'll have to slay a banshee in a catamaran.

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.

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

Whoa, and if you overlay a Fibonacci spiral on a golden spiral it matches up almost perfectly!

One perk of being born at 0.88c is that your birthday is over two days long.

There's quark color, but that's not really color--it's just an admission by 20th century physicists that numbers are boring.

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

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

Each quarter of the lanes from left to right correspond loosely to breast cancer stages one through four (at diagnosis).

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

I'm glad modern car washes use synthetic baleen, instead of harvesting it from whales like 1800s car washes did.

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

I figured that now that society has collapsed, I wouldn't need to wear clothes anymore, but apparently that violates some weird rule of quantum gravity.

I'm waiting for the day when, if you tell someone 'I'm from the internet', instead of laughing they just ask 'oh, what part?'

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

So, um. Do you want to get a drink after the game?

The problem with learning about biology is that everyone you meet is it.

Quick, fashion a climbing harness out of cat-6 cable and follow me down.

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

Guest comic by Jeffrey Rowland of Overcompensating/Wigu. Jeffrey is famous as the picture on the Wikipedia article on 'Necrosis'.

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

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

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.

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.

Plus, the photo was geotagged, my unlocked password manager was visible on the laptop, AND you could see my naked reflection in the dark part of the screen.

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.

This dating is corroborated by the presence of stone tools at the site, rather than earlier and less effective helium ones.

People with all six of those names agree that it's weird that we have teeth, when you think about it for too long. Just about everyone agrees on that, except—in a still-unexplained statistical anomaly—people named "Trevor."

Fortunately, the internet has a virtually inexhaustible supply of code that doesn't work and people who are wrong, which bodes well for a return to normalcy. [Note: Click to read context for the cancer comics. She's doing well.]

Lifehacking!

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.'

During the day it also activates for neat clouds and pretty sunsets.

These rocks are from a time before eyes, brains, and bones, pieces of a land warmed by an unseen sun.

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

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.

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.

Each one contains a chocolate shaped like a famous spacecraft and, for the later numbers, a pamphlet on managing anxiety.

The choices we make Tuesday could have MASSIVE and PERMANENT effects on the charts on Nate Silver's blog!

Or so I hope?

If I'm not going to upgrade to a powered one, I should at LEAST stop leaving the door open so often.

We're going to have to work together to get over our hangups if we're going to learn to move on Catan's hexagonal grid. It's bad enough that we lost our crew of pawns when we passed within firing range of Battleship.

I'm a big fan of Kurt Halsey

At least if you're really into, like, Turkish archaeology, store clerks aren't like 'hey, how 'bout those Derinkuyu underground cities!' when they're trying to be polite.

Neal Stephenson thinks it's cute to name his labels 'dengo'

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

I'm sorry, but the author of this Facebook comment clearly believes you were.

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

While it seemed like a fun prank at the time, I realize my prank fire extinguishers full of leaded gasoline were a mistake.

Others include "We've incrementally improved the estimate of this coefficient," "Maybe all these categories are wrong," and "We found a way to make student volunteers worse at tasks."

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

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.

Haha, you'll see!

Our retina display features hundreds of pixels per inch in the central fovea region.

If you want to evenly space them, it's easiest to alternate between the Arctic and Antarctic. Some people just go to the Arctic twice, near the equinoxes so the visits are almost 6 months apart, but it's not the same.

Washington, DC: Eastern gray squirrel, Amur honeysuckle. Puerto Rico: Crested anole, sea grape. US as a whole: Mallard, eastern poison ivy.

Even with a blank map, a lot of people can only name 45-50 of the 64 states.

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

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

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

Check it out--when I tug the C-terminal tail, the binding tunnel squeezes!

RIP the surface of Mars

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

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

2030: "I just bought a house for one bitcoin. No, it's the equivalent of a dollar. Houses are often transferred for a nominal fee because the buyer is taking responsibility for containing the holo-banshees in the attic."

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

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

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

He actually installed each piece in a different car in the lot, then built a new car in the spot from the displaced pieces. It's a confusing maneuver known as the auto-troll shuffle.

Dr. Fauci is not permitted to have a cat, because as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, his petting one would be considered giving aid and comfort to an allergen.

Of course, since their cautionary tale was reported in a print newspaper, no one read it.

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

The sudden introduction of Venusian flowers led to an explosive growth of unusual Earth pollinators, which became known as the "butterfly effect."

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

The weak twin primes conjecture states that there are infinitely many pairs of primes. The strong twin primes conjecture states that every prime p has a twin prime (p+2), although (p+2) may not look prime at first. The tautological prime conjecture states that the tautological prime conjecture is true.

If Google Maps stops letting you navigate to (Clay County District) A in West Virginia, you can try Jump, OH -> Ina, IL -> Big Hole, TX.

Unfortunately, body size and bite force continue to increase.

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.

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

According to River, 'adequate' vacuuming systems drain the human body at about half a liter per second.

They're really the worst tech support team. And their solutions are always the same. "This OS X update broke something." "LET'S INFILTRATE APPLE BY MORPHING APPLES!"

November marks the birthday of Charles Schulz, pioneer of tongue awareness.

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

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!

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

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.

"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."

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

Things Leonhard Euler created ( most of math ( overlapping circle diagrams ) a cricket bowling machine ) Things John Venn created

"TURN OFF THE LASER GUIDE STAR" "WHY" "STAR CATS"

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

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

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

Offscreen, bottom left: Whether the custom :coronavirus: Slack react emoji you just added was public domain or whether you should have put a Creative Commons credit somewhere

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

As far as I can tell, Navajo doesn't have a common word for 'zero'. do-neh-lini means 'neutral'.

Did you base the saucer shape on pop culture depictions of aliens, or was that stuff based on your ships? Does the rotational symmetry help with ... hey, where are you going?

Later we'll dress up like Big Oil thugs and jump Ralph Nader.

I started off with countless problems. But now I know, thanks to COUNT(), that I have "#REF! ERROR: Circular dependency detected" problems.

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

DOWNSIDES: Adobe people may periodically email your newsroom to ask you to call it an 'Adobe® PDF document,' but they'll reverse course once they learn how sarcastically you can pronounce the registered trademark symbol.

Our lawyers were worried because it turns out the company inherits its debt from the parent universe, but luckily cosmic inflation reduced it to nearly zero.

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

The 8th panel is my favorite

[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!'

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

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

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

To generate #1 albums, 'jay --help' recommends the -z flag.

Take THAT, piece of 1980s-era infrastructure I've inexplicably maintained on my systems for 15 years despite never really learning how it works.

You don't want the nitrogen percentage to be too high or you run the risk of eutrophication.

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

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

If enough people uphill decide to try the rolling strategy, they can make the decision for you.

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

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

I've been trying for a couple years now but I haven't been able to come up with a name dumber than 'Renesmee'.

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

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

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.

This really validates Jones's strategy of getting several thousand more votes than Smith. In retrospect, that was a smart move; those votes were crucial.

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

The BBC lead was 'The elusive erogenous zone said to exist in some women may be a myth, say researchers who have hunted for it.' I couldn't read it with a straight face.

Blatantly banking on customers not understanding that it's like a Hollywood studio advertising that their new movie was 'watched by Roger Ebert'.

You know what happens when you assert--you make an ass out of the emergency response team.

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

'Guys? The Town is supposed to be good, and I thou--' 'PHYSICIST STEPHEN HAWKING DECLARES NEW FILM BEST IN ALL SPACE AND TIME' 'No, I just heard that--' 'SHOULD SCIENCE PLAY A ROLE IN JUDGING BEN AFFLECK?' 'I don't think--' 'WHAT ABOUT MATT DAMON?'

Hey, at least I ran out of staples.

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

Even when you try to make nice, smooth ice cubes in a freezer, sometimes one of them will shoot out a random ice spike, which physicists ascribe to kiki conservation.

If the breaking news is about an event at a hospital or a lab, move it all the way over to the right.

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

Now I'm tempted to start telling people that I secretly don't actually know how to do any physics calculations, and so all the answers in What If are based on me actually trying to do the thing and then reporting what happened, but phrased as if it's hypothetical.

On the plus side, we definitely killed that cancer over there, even if we caused a bunch more everywhere else.

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.

They'll pick music and culture that they know annoys you. Building in behavioral easter eggs is a fair retaliation!

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

If you ever see someone using a capital xi in an equation, just observe them quietly to learn as much as you can before they return to their home planet.

On the other hand, as far as they know, my system is working perfectly.

The government has been trying to sell off the Federal Helium Reserve for a few years now, but the sale has been on hold while they try to figure out how to explain this situation to buyers.

The place I'd least like to live is the farm in the background of those diagrams showing how tornadoes form.

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

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

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

Every time you email a file to yourself so you can pull it up on your friend's laptop, Tim Berners-Lee sheds a single tear.

You say this daily walk will reduce my risk of death from cardiovascular disease by 30%, but also increase my risk of death by bear attack by 300%? That's a 280% increased! I'm not a sucker; I'm staying inside.

Anyway, that's a common misconception. Geese live for a long time; all the ones we can see will probably keep flying around for billions of years before they explode.

You know when you can't hear your speakers, and you keep turning various volume controls up higher and higher in confusion, and then someone hits the mute button and there's a deafening blast of sound? That's basically what happened at Chernobyl.

I hear in some places, you need one form of ID to buy a gun, but two to pay for it by check. It's interesting who has what incentives to care about what mistakes.

The text ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US with a lengthy footnote explaining that I got this tattoo in 2020 and not, as you may assume, 2001, but offering no further clarification.

Researchers claim to have synthesized six additional elements in the second row, temporarily named 'pentium' through 'unnilium'.

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".

Any arrangement is an edible arrangement if you're hungry enough.

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

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.

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

Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. There is no road out of this oblivion; we must embrace it. We must join with the darkness. Ba'al the Annihilator offers us no happiness, no answers, naught but the cold embrace of the void. To imagine any other end is delusion. We must give in to the will of Ba'al, for he will one day consume us and our world alike. I therefore call on Congress to fully fund space exploration, and to join with Ba'al, the Eater of Souls. Thank you.

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

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".

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

I woke up to find that I had scrawled the last line of this sleepily on a sheet of paper on my desk. I shouldn't have listened to the 70's hit marathon on the way home from work the night before.

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

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

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

The only post to achieve perfect balance between the four was a hilarious joke about Mark Zuckerberg getting caught using a pseudonym to sneak past the TSA.

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

Merge branch 'asdfasjkfdlas/alkdjf' into sdkjfls-final

As of this writing, the only thing that's 'razor-thin' or 'too close to call' is the gap between the consensus poll forecast and the result.

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

Although not permanently.

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

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

I don't know what's more telling--the number of pages in the Wikipedia talk page argument over whether the 1/87.0857143 scale is called "HO" or "H0", or the fact that within minutes of first hearing of it I had developed an extremely strong opinion on the issue.

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

The number one rule of string manipulation is that youâ€™ve got to specify your encodings.

Evolutionarily speaking, mushrooms are technically a type of ghost.

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.

I'll take mine on the rocks, no ice.

The 2007 Bridge to Terebithia trailer put me off too much to see that particular movie, but I am cautiously optimistic about Where the Wild Things Are.

Scientists are also sexy, let's not forget that.

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

... tazer ... fire extinguisher ... bird feeder ... toilet paper ...

Oh God, the tornado picked up snakes!

In the new edition of The Giving Tree, the tree uses social tools to share with its friend all the best places to buy things.

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

You can come on in, we're all fully vaccinated. Except the spare room off the living room. Don't go in there, we're not fully vaccinated in there.

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.

SELECT * FROM GHOSTS

If you study graphs in which edges can link more than two nodes, you're more properly called a hyperedgelord.

Apple uses automated schnapps IVs.

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

For many of the anatomy pictures on Wikipedia, I think this is actually not far from reality. They only look all formal and professional due to careful cropping.

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

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.

I'm going to change the sign so the pole is horizontal and the sign is mounted on the front like a plunger, so I can carry it around like a lance to gently push people back if they try to approach.

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.

The Antikythera mechanism had a whole set of gears specifically to track the cyclic popularity of skinny jeans and low-rise waists.

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

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'.

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.

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

It's a myth that the Great Wall of China is the only human-made structure visible from space--there are LOTS of structures for us to feel self-conscious about!

Washington state is seeing great success with reintroducing the Columbia River Basin subpopulation. We cannot allow them to further widen the interstate bun gap.

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

I have never been lied to by data in a .txt file which has been hand-aligned.

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

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

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

It's like a half-solved cryptogram where the solution is a piece of FORTH code written by someone who doesn't know FORTH.

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

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

My hobby: Taking advantage of the rice myth by posting articles on "how to save your wet phone" which are actually just elaborate recipes for rice pilaf.

Amazon.com took a surprise early lead with 'Time required to transport a package from Iquitos, Peru to Manaus, Brazil' but then lost it at 'Minutes to skeletonize a cow'.

Gorilla, yes. Adorable golden retriever, yes. But it says nothing about meerkats.

It took a lot of booster rockets, but luckily Amazon had recently built thousands of them to bring Amazon Prime same-day delivery to the Moon colony.

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.

Technically now it's a 34-foot zone.

What'll I say -- "I was staring at some cat vomit when I got the news?"

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.

FYI: If you get curious and start trying to calculate the time adjustment function that minimizes the gap between the most-used and least-used digit (for a representative sample of common cook times) without altering any time by more than 10%, and someone asks you what you're doing, it's easier to just lie.

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

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]

You can tell most people don’t really assign an absolute meaning to these numbers because in some places and time periods, “billion” has meant 1,000x what it's meant in others, and a lot of us never even noticed.

When designing an interface, imagine that your program is all that stands between the user and hot, sweaty, tangled-bedsheets-fingertips-digging-into-the-back sex.

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

Hey, golf balls float on lava, so this should make recovering them from the hazards easier.

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

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

Those few who escaped found the emergency cutoff box disabled. The stampede lasted two hours and reached the bottom three times.

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

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

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

For the sake of simplicity, gardeners are assumed to move through Euclidean space--neglecting the distortion from general relativity--unless they are in the vicinity of a Schwarzschild Orchid.

We're working to make sure the images are as up-to-date and accurate as possible, with a minimum number of sponsored galaxies.

Your IDE's color may vary.

If you draw a diagonal line from lower left to upper right, that's the ICP 'Miracles' axis.

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

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

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]"

Your problem is so terrible, I worry that, if I help you, I risk drawing the attention of whatever god of technology inflicted it on you.

I am so excited about the Kepler mission. This is the second most important thing our species has ever done, right behind inventing the concept of delivery pizza.

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

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

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

If you're turning 27 and were born in the Northeast, maybe you were conceived in the April blizzard of 1982. Imagine: snowed in, candles, massage oil, your mom sporting nothing but her early 80's haircut and a smile ... aren't you glad you read the title-text?

Okay, everyone, cross yourselves, then cross the streams.

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

Nothing personal, high schoolers.

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

You make forgetting look so easy.

The Singularity happened, but not to us.

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

The last band of color indicates the snake's tolerance for being held before biting.

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

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.

It's like they got together and said 'what do we miss most from the internet in 1998? that's right, embedded MIDI!'

Dot Tumblr Dot Com, on the other hand, would be an awful name for a band, if only because of how hard it would be to direct people to your band's website.

"Cumulative number of coronavirus spreadsheets created over time" is a spreadsheet I am coming dangerously close to creating.

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

In the aviation world, they don't use AM/PM times. Instead, all times are assumed to be AM unless they're labeled NOTAM.

I recognize that chocolate is its own thing on which reasonable people may differ. Everything else here is objective fact.

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

Opening dialogue by Scott

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

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

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

You might want to bring your frost-sensitive plants in from the patio. The high-level aerosols may result in short-term cooling across the entire backyard.

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

There, I showed you it.

Some lava around the piercing site is normal, but keep an eye out for spreading earthquakes and eruptive activity that might indicate rifting.

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

Sometimes the best fun looks like boredom.

I WONDERED why he kept asking whether we thought the impact speed was too low.

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!!!

Guest comic by Jeph Jacques of Questionable Content, whose internal monologue hasn't been speaking to him for the past three years.

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

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

Please, we need your help. Our research suggests you're the last living descendant of the person who knew how to format this config file.

In-universe, Bart Simpson and Harry Potter were the same age in 1990. Bart is perpetually 10 years old because of a spell put on his town by someone trying to keep him from getting his Hogwarts letter.

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

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

I hate being the slowest guy in the lab.

'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.'

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

'Rating: 1/5. Room filled to brim with semen, and when front desk clerk opened mouth to talk, bedbugs poured out.'

We've learned that weird spacing and diacritics in the methodology description are apparently the key to good research; luckily, we've developed an AI tool to help us figure out where to add them.

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.

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

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

Can you pass the nackle?

Building Inspectors HATE This One Weird Trick

And they choose Al Gore as Internet Secretary.

C'mon, ESA Solar Orbiter team, just give the Parker probe a LITTLE nudge at aphelion. Crash it into the sun. Fulfill the dream of Icarus. It is your destiny.

People may complain about readability, but even with jpeg compression, extracting the data points is usually computationally feasible if there aren't too many of them.

Later, walking out of jail after posting $10,000 bail: "Wait, this isn't the street the county jail is on."

Want to feel old? Wait.

It me, your father.

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.

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

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

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

The malaria party was David's idea

Roundly-condemned headlinese initiative shuttered indefinitely.

There's also a +1 sometimes, which is there to keep everyone on their toes. In the future, people who got to pick cool numbers by signing up for Google Voice early will be revered as wizards.

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

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

I live on a torn-bag-of-potato-chips-where-the-tear-is-rapidly-growing fault, which is terrifying.

'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.'

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

If anyone tries this on you, the best reply is a deadpan "Oh yeah, that's a common potato chip flavor in Canada."

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

I used to do this all the time.

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

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