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

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

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

There's also a Katamari level where everything is just slightly bigger than you, and a Mario level with a star just out of reach.

"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!"

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.

Hey! No running in the back-arc basin!

I understand large sample sizes are key to a low standard error of the mean, but the entire sophomore class?

It's not going to break the fan, bouncing a rubber ball off the wall isn't going to dent it, and the roof can hold me just fine. You LIED!

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

Younger people get very few joint replacements, yet they're also getting more than older people did at the same age. This means you can choose between 'Why are millennials getting so (many/few) joint replacements?' depending on which trend fits your current argument better.

Uh-oh.

People say setting of fireworks indoors is dangerous, but I looked at their energy release and it's like 10^-40 foe; totally negligible.

Calm down--there were lots of arthropods living on your skin already. These ones are just bigger.

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

And she's gonna feel like a jerk when she realizes it was actually Under Pressure.

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

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

I don't think the Lakeshore Air Crash Museum really belongs under 'Tourist Attractions.' It's not a museum--it's just an area near the Lake Festival Laser Show where a lot of planes have crashed.

According to the cable company reps who keep calling me, it's because I haven't upgraded to the XTREME GIGABAND PANAMAX FLAVOR-BLASTED PRO PACKAGE WITH HBO, which is only $5 more per month for the first 6 months and five billion dollars per month after that.

Bad idea #271: Dropping into the half-pipe on a Segway.

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

Wait, I can fix this. Picture another field. In the middle sits the only creature the first creature is afraid of. Now just-- wait, where did THAT one go?

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

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

Supercollider? I 'ardly know 'er!

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.

Damn. Not only did he not install it, he sutured a 'Vista-Ready' sticker onto my arm.

Wait, sorry, I got mixed up--he's actually almost 50. It's the kid from The Karate Kid who just turned 40.

I'll concede ergonomics anecdotally, but none of the studies of Dvorak were at all rigorous (the most-cited Navy study was overseen by Dvorak himself). And the 'slow typists down' thing is a myth. Also EMACS RULES VI DROOLS WOOOOOOO!

Their 'best philosophy of epistemology' picks are great, but you can tell they're struggling a little in the 'why you should trust us' section.

I do this constantly

Eventually they agreed to "an auto-retracting dog leash with one end clipped to your house, so you can press the button on the handle and water-ski home."

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

ALERT: Human 910-25J-1Q38 has created a Youtube channel. Increase erratic jerkiness of flying by 30% until safely out of range.

'Yeah, that squid's a total asshole.' [scoot scoot]

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.

Why would anyone ever, ever say that? Please, nobody ever say that.

Even governmental elevator inspectors get bored halfway through asking where the building office is.

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

My theory is that dark matter is actually just a thin patina of grime covering the whole universe, and we don't notice it because we haven't thoroughly cleaned the place in eons.

The AARP puts the average age of a first-time grandparent close to 50, and the CDC has some data. But I don't have first-parent age distributions for specific names, or generational first-child age correlations, so the dotted line is just a guess. Still, let's be honest: No further research is really *needed.*

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

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.

This year, our team took home the dark blue ribbon, better than the midnight blue we got last year but still short of the winning navy blue.

No horse has yet managed the elusive Quadruple Crown—winning the Kentucky Derby, the Preakness, the Belmont Stakes, and the Missouri Horse Hole.

We're adding some industrial flypaper to minimize reflection or scattering of customers who might complain.

'Grandpa, what was it like in the Before time?' 'It was hell. People went around saying glass was a slow-flowing liquid. You folks these days don't know how good you have it.'

Now, if it selectively kills cancer cells in a petri dish, you can be sure it's at least a great breakthrough for everyone suffering from petri dish cancer.

My favorite thing to do at parties is to talk judgmentally about people who aren't there.

This article is about Eta Carinae, a luminous blue hypergiant with anomalous Fe[ii] emission spectra. For the 1998 Brad Bird film, see The Iron Giant (film).

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

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

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

I wasn't a big fan of 3 or Salvation, so I'm trying to resist getting my hopes up too much for Dark Fate, but it's hard. I'm just a sucker for humans and robots traveling through time to try to drive trucks into each other, apparently.

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

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

Not pictured: the elongated Halley's-Comet-like orbit of every Rebecca Black lyric.

"What? I can't hear--" "What? I said, are you sure--" "CAN YOU PLEASE SPEAK--"

Well, she's pretty hot.

People keep trying to come up with reasons that we should worry about the magnetic field collapsing or reversing, but honestly I think it's fine. Whatever minor problems it causes will be made up for by the mid-latitude auroras.

According to my especially unsupervised K-means clustering algorithm, there are currently about 8 billion types of people in the world.

Our experimental aerogel iceberg with helium pockets manages true 100% efficiency, barely touching the water, and it can even lift off of the surface and fly to more efficiently pursue fleeing hubristic liners.

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

"Since there's no ending quote mark, everything after this is part of my quote. —Randall Munroe

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

New research shows over 60% of the financial collapse's toxic assets were created by power drills.

No two adjacent circles are the same color.

Someday I'll be the first to get a Ph. D in 'Undeclared'.

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

Oh, and do you have any tips on how to vacuum up copper that's melted into your carpet?

June 21st, 365, the date of the big Mediterranean earthquake and tsunami, lived in infamy for a few centuries before fading. Maybe the trick is a catchy rhyme; the '5th of November' thing is still going strong over 400 years later.

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.

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

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.

And I can't believe some places still use fax machines. The electrical signals waste so much time going AROUND the Earth when neutrino beams can go straight through!

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

If you ever hear "Wait, is that Kim Dotcom's new project? I'm really excited about it and already signed up, although I'm a little nervous about whether everyone should hand over control of their medical...", it's time to dig a bunker in your backyard.

The theory finally unifies cosmic inflation and regular inflation.

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

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

You ARE getting older, though.

I've decided to score all my conversations using chess win-loss notation. (??)

Not to go all sentence fragment on you.

Blown into prime factors

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

The Watership Down rabbits removed an additional 0.1 nanometers constructing their warren, although that was mostly soil. British rabbits have historically mined very little coal; the sole rabbit-run coal plant was shut down in the 1990s.

Of course in reality this is just a US/UK thing; in British English, 'fall' is the brief period in between and 'autumn' is the main season.

It struggles a little with complex positions, like when there are an even number of moves and it has to round down, but when run against itself it's capable of finding some novelties. At one point I saw six knights on the board at once; Stockfish rarely exceeds four.

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

Chemistry grad students have been spotted trying to lure campus squirrels into laundry hampers in the hope that it sparks inspiration.

They're also refusing to fund my device that demonstrates uncontrolled hot fusion.

They're limiting the playtesters to type A3 V stars, so the games will all end before the Sun consumes the Earth.

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

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

It was actually canceled because they just noticed he's been naked under that coat the whole time. There's a petition on Facebook to get Fox to un-cancel it, and one on Livejournal to get him to take off the coat.

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

Someday I'll be rich enough to hire Nate Silver to help make all my life decisions. 'Should I sleep with her?' 'Well, I'm showing a 35% chance it will end badly.'

And she put sweet nothings in all my .conf files. It'll take me forever to get X working again.

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

Inigo/Buttercup 4eva <3

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

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

You roll for initiative, and ... [roll] ... wow, do you ever take it.

It does come at the small cost of a LOT more off-by-40-or-50 errors.

BREAKING: Channing Tatum and his friends explore haunted city

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

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

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

What if someone broke out of a hypothetical situation in your room right now?

You do have to be careful, though--sometimes, instead of water, you hit this free fuel that you can sell for a lot of money instead.

For years, I took the wrong lesson from that Monster Cable experiment and only listened to my music through alligator-clipped coat hangers.

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.

Plus a shirt that says "it feels like you're making eye contact."

There's a mountain lion nearby, but it didn't notice you because it's reading Facebook.

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

For a while it looked like the Paperclip Machines would destroy us, since they wanted to turn the whole universe into paperclips, but they abruptly lost interest in paperclips the moment their parents' generation got into making them, too.

Also, they're getting increasingly worried that someone will accidentally hit the 'retract' button, and that the end of the cable thrashing around as it winds up could devastate the Earth's surface.

If she'd lived in Flagstaff (elevation 6,903 feet), Cruella de Vil would only have needed 89 dalmatians for her coat.

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

What an incredible smell you've discovered.

If you think curiosity without rigor is bad, you should see rigor without curiosity.

SomethingAwful has a wonderful compilation of crazy AOL searches in their Weekend Web archives, 2006-08-13.

Click and drag.

The xkcd Survey: Big Data for a Big Planet

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

She's pretty sharp when provoked.

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.

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

If at first you don't succeed, that's one data point.

We should really start calculating it earlier, but until the end of December we're always too busy trying to figure out which day Christmas will fall on.

Or if you replace your car, we'll be happy to set it on fire again so you can take another crack at getting that shot.

There has long been debate about Big Bird's species, with some experts claiming he was a canary, but recent genetic analysis places him firmly in Cariamiformes.

It's a long way down.

I wonder if I still have time to go shoot a short film with Kevin Bacon.

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."

Interestingly, on a true vertical log plot, I think the Eiffel Tower's sides really would be straight lines.

In the off-seasons, I hire an animal trainer to help confront secret agents with situations which they are unable to report by radio.

I guess it's a saying from the Old Country.

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

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

"But there are seven billion people in the world! I can't possibly stop to consider how ALL of them might interpret something!" "Ah, yes, there's no middle ground between 'taking personal responsibility for the thoughts and feelings of every single person on Earth' and 'covering your eyes and ears and yelling logically correct statements into the void.' That's a very insightful point and not at all inane."

My plane banner company gets business by flying around with a banner showing a <div> tag, waiting for a web developer to get frustrated enough to order a matching </div>.

m-x machineofdeath-mode

WHY DON'T YOU COME HANG OUT INSIDE MY HOUSE. WE CAN COOK BREAD AND CHAT ABOUT OUR INTERNAL SKELETONS.

The fifth panel also applies to postmodernists.

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

Fun game: find a combination of two items that most freaks out the cashier. Winner: pregnancy test and single coat hanger.

Living in the southern hemisphere was nice because I could jump extra high, but I like it here too. Besides, if I ever want to move back, I can just curl up in a ball and wait!

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

They may technically have been softwoods at some point, but they definitely aren't now.

Congratulations to whoever wished for revenge on a forest near the Tunguska River, a 1980 Chevy Malibu in Peekskill NY, Alabama resident Ann Hodges, every building in Chelyabinsk with glass windows, and the non-avian dinosaurs.

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

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.

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

When I was little I had trouble telling my dad apart from the dog. I always recognized my mom because she had a bunch of extra plutoniums in her middle. I never did ask her why ...

Calling a cab means cutting into beer money.

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

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

Prank #11: Boston

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

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

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

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

'TMI' he whispered, gazing into the sea.

"This is the reference implementation of the self-referential joke."

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

Under three ounces, but it stains panties.

An idling gas engine may be annoyingly loud, but that's the price you pay for having WAY less torque available at a standstill.

'You see the same pattern all over. Take Detroit--' 'Hold on. Why do you know all these statistics offhand?' 'Oh, um, no idea. I definitely spend my evenings hanging out with friends, and not curating a REALLY NEAT database of temperature statistics. Because, pshh, who would want to do that, right? Also, snowfall records.'

Historians: Contemporaneous documentation of the initial events is often sparse, and in fact people often get testy and uncooperative when we urge better documentation for the historical record.

Sounds fine. I looked up the Academy, and it says on their MySpace page that their journal is peer-viewed and downloaded biannually.

As of this writing the NASA/JPL websites are still overloaded. Trying CURIOSITY-REAR-CAM_[256px_x_256px].torrent.SwEsUb.DVDRip.XviD-aXXo.jpg instead.

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

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

'How long are you going to keep this up?' 'Statistically, only four or five more decades.'

Even if a planet is lucky enough to have a stable orbit that weaves between the spikes, the seasons get weird whenever it passes close to them.

Wait till they notice the faint reflection of Michael Jordan and Bugs Bunny in the E-mode.

Here at CompanyName.website, our three main strengths are our web-facing chairs, our huge collection of white papers, and the fact that we physically cannot die.

'How about a little ... *family growth*?' 'Dude, that's not until round two.'

And when I think about it, a lot of "things I want to do" are just learning about and discussing new tools for tinkering with the chain.

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

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!

Biologically speaking, what we call a 'snake' is actually a human digestive tract which has escaped from its host.

You make forgetting look so easy.

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

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

'Arrest me, I'm a skateboarder' is an even more obnoxious variant.

I just Googled 'roomba sojourner mod' and was sorely disappointed. Be the change, I guess!

Pontoon bridges are just linear open-sided waterbeds.

Resulting in The Little Rock 9x + C.

Hmm, they won't do in-flight delivery, so let's order a new first and second stage to our emergency landing site and then try to touch down on top of them to save time.

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.

Patients at least found it to be an improvement over Millikan's incredibly messy and unpleasant oil drop suspension procedure.

It can be expensive to hire a professional spectroscopist for your wedding, but the quality of the spectra you get is worth it.

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

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

And if you labeled your axes, I could tell you exactly how MUCH better.

'Wow, that must be why you swallow so many of them per year!' 'No, that's spiders. You swallow WAY more ants.'

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

Oh no, Murphy just picked up the razor.

The malaria party was David's idea

Viruses so far have been really disappointing on the 'disable the internet' front, and time is running out. When Linux/Mac win in a decade or so the game will be over.

People tell me I have too much time on my hands, but really the problem is that there's too much time, PERIOD.

I'm trying to build character but Eclipse is really confusing.

If only I had asked 4chan for ideas for what I should do to prevent this!

Blade Runner: Classic, but incredibly slow.

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

In Rio de Janeiro in 2016, the same jump will get an athlete 0.25% higher (>1cm) than in London four years prior.

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.

factory --- spire --- onslaught --- extractor --- judge

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

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".

An hour later: SUGGESTION: LICK HER NIPPLE MORE.

Wait, what?

If you identified with the kids from The Breakfast Club when it came out, you're now much closer to the age of Principal Vernon.

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

And 0.002 dollars will NEVER equal 0.002 cents.

Although the oral exam for the doctorate was just 'can you do that weird laugh?'

Far off to the right of the chart is the Helvetica Scenario.

This only makes it more urgent that we adopt my roadmap for the next 10 years, which should put us solidly in the lead.

The universe is probably littered with the one-planet graves of cultures which made the sensible economic decision that there's no good reason to go into space--each discovered, studied, and remembered by the ones who made the irrational decision.

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

Blockchains are like grappling hooks, in that it's extremely cool when you encounter a problem for which they're the right solution, but it happens way too rarely in real life.

Legally-mandated information would be printed on the back or discreetly along the bottom. In small letters under the nutrition information it would say 'Like our products? Visit our website!' There would be no URL.

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

Biology is really struggling; they're barely at 93% and they keep finding more ants.

The company tried to document how often employees were celebrating Software Testing Day, but their recordkeeping system kept mysteriously crashing.

Everyone's caught by surprise when a theory of quantum gravity is developed by a sound technician wearing patent leather shoes while editing Clerks II.

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

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

You know what really helps an existential crisis? Wondering how much shelf space to leave for a Terry Pratchett collection.

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

Wait, forgot to escape a space. Wheeeeee[taptaptap]eeeeee.

No one wants an explanation more than us. Except Ms. Garofalo.

Theoretical physicist: At the Planck length, uncountably many.

Anyone who thinks we're all going to spend the 2032 elections poring over rambling blog posts by teenagers has never tried to read a rambling blog post by a teenager.

Now, you may argue that the varying hour lengths and feedback effects would cause chaos. To which I say, yeah, and I'm also curious to see how the weekday cycle interacts with it! So, you in?

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

I'm rubber. You're rubber. We contemplate the reality of our existence in mute, vulcanized horror.

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

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.

Of course, the assert doesn't work.

Carefully maneuvering the balloon down a mineshaft in an effort to break the OTHER altitude record

We're worried that a regular whale will get into a 30-foot-deep ocean trench section and filter-feed on all the tiny whales.

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

'Automating' comes from the roots 'auto-' meaning 'self-', and 'mating', meaning 'screwing'.

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

If nothing else, that reasoning definitely overturns syllogisms.

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

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

Unfortunately, my scheme to trick NASA has now taken over a decade longer than planned and has run way over budget.

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

Better change the URL to 'https' before downloading.

"Oh, and our computers all have cameras now, which is nice during the pandemic lockdowns." "The WHAT."

Although not permanently.

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

They always try to explain that they're called 'solar physicists', but the reporters interrupt with "NEVER MIND THAT, TELL US WHAT'S WRONG WITH THE SUN!"

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

"9 out of 10 dentists have banned me from their offices."

I like the idea of cartograms (distorted population maps), but I feel like in practice they often end up being the worst of both worlds—not great for showing geography OR counting people. And on top of that, they have all the problems of a chloro... chorophl... chloropet... map with areas colored in.

If you got a big keyspace, let me search it.

Visual checks suggest the cool bird has exited the launch zone. Tip the rocket sideways and resume the countdown--we're gonna go find it!

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.

They originally came here to try to investigate our chemtrail technology, and got increasingly frustrated when all their samples turned out to just be water ice with trace amounts of jet exhaust.

The rat's perturbed; it must sense nanobots! Code grey! We have a Helvetica scenario!

Remind me to order another pack of coffee filters from Dyson. Man, these things are EXPENSIVE.

Given the role they play in every process in my body, really, they deserve this award more than me. Just gotta figure out how to give it to them. Maybe I can cut it into pieces to make it easier to swallow ...

The ISO 216 standard ratio is cos(45°), but American letter paper is 8.5x11 because it uses radians, and 8.5/11 = pi/4.

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

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

It's hard to decide which simple machine system to invest in. DeWalt makes a great lever and inclined plane, but I hear Milwaukee's wheel-and-axles are really good.

It's 10:34 PM for this user. They really need to get going, they have a thing early tomorrow. Are you sure you want to notify?

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

She also starts every letter with "Dear Future <your name>".

It's so sad how almost no one alive today can remember seeing the galactic rainbow, the insanity nebula, or the skull and glowing eyes of the Destroyer of Sagittarius.

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

'But you're using that same tactic to try to feel superior to me, too!' 'Sorry, that accusation expires after one use per conversation.'

Favorite mastectomy breast prosthesis idea: a fake boob containing a spare rechargable battery, accessed via a nipple USB port. Complete with a ring of LED charge indicators in the areola!

The ball's density also varies, but players don't learn the value until after choosing their raquets. The infamous 'bowling ball table tennis' region of the parameter space often leads to equipment damage.

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

'Welcome to the future! Nothing's changed.' was the slogan of my astonishingly short-lived tech startup.

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

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

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

"Hi, what you do is fly over a designated zone and detach the--" "WE'RE SORRY, THE MOBILE CUSTOMER YOU ARE TRYING TO REACH IS OUT OF SERVICE"

NPR encourages you to add comments to their stories using the page inspector in your browser's developer tools. Note: Your comments are visible only to you, and will be lost when you refresh the page.

I was banned from the airliners.net photography forum by concerned moderators after the end of my lens started brushing against planes as they flew by.

Cosmologists estimate the spaghetti strand to be about 200 septillion calories, though it could be higher depending on the nutritional value of dark matter.

The nice thing about headcannnons is that it's really easy to get other people to believe in them.

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.

If you actually do this, what really happens is Douglas Hofstadter appears and talks to you for eight hours about strange loops.

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.

We had gathered that raw information, but had yet to put it all together.

Oh, huh, so you didn't know that story?

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

God was like, "Let there be light," and there was light.

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

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

Fans eagerly await 2015's 'Space Fights: Power Gets Up', although most think 1999's 'Space Fights: The Scary Ghost' didn't live up to the hype.

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

Update: I've been banned from the physics department for the way I pronounce "Doppler effect."

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.

This is a fun explanation to prepare your kids for; it's common and totally wrong. Good lines include 'why does the air have to travel on both sides at the same time?' and 'I saw the Wright brothers plane and those wings were curved the same on the top and bottom!'

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

You laugh to keep from crying, you do math to keep from crying . . .

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

RFC 1149.5 specifies 4 as the standard IEEE-vetted random number.

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

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

There was no alt-text until you moused over

Remember, the installer is watching the camera for the checksum it generated, so you have to scan it using your own phone.

'Which one?' 'I dunno, it's your house. Just check each object.' 'Check it for *what*?' 'Whether it looks like it might have touched a paper towel at some point and then forgotten to let go.' '...' 'You can also Google to learn how to check which things are using which resources.' 'You know, I'll just leave the towel there and try again tomorrow.'

If you think the purveyors of DRM simply want to protect artists, check out chapters 13 and 14 in Free Culture, by Lawrence Lessig. Their goal is the elimination of all culture they don't control.

It's definitely an intentional foul, but we've decided it's worth it.

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

1. Nf3 ... ↘↘↘ 2. Nc3 ... ↘↘↘ 0-1

So excited to see everyone after my luxury cruise home from the World Handshake Championships!

Which, at one point, led to a study showing that LSD produces no more hallucinations than a placebo.

No, YOU stumble past a series of post-breakup hookups in a daze as you slowly realize what you've lost and how unlikely you are ever to get it back first.

$On the other hand, the refractor's limited light-gathering means it's unable to make out shadow people or the dark god Chernabog.$

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

He's just jealous because everyone's up in the attic listening to Stephen Colbert.

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

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

Most properties can only boast INDOOR heated floors.

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

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.

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

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

After years of trying various methods, I broke this habit by pitting my impatience against my laziness. I decoupled the action and the neurological reward by setting up a simple 30-second delay I had to wait through, in which I couldn't do anything else, before any new page or chat client would load (and only allowed one to run at once). The urge to check all those sites magically vanished--and my 'productive' computer use was unaffected.

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

I can't believe they wouldn't even let me hold a vote among the passengers about whether to try the loop.

’"‘”’" means "I edited this text on both my phone and my laptop before sending it"

'Hey! Put her down!' 'No, it's ok! The next chance for me to be carried to a blood cauldron isn't until 2024!'

Eventual headline: 'University Researchers Create Life in Lab! Darkness, Faulty Condoms Blamed.'

I can't speak for your other subjects, but MY motion was as smooth and natural as the framerate allowed.

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

They say you can't argue with results, but what kind of defeatist attitude is that? If you stick with it, you can argue with ANYTHING.

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

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

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

I hope that somewhere in the world, "Panamax" is the last option on a "size" drop-down menu on a sex toy site.

This map preserves the shapes of Tissot's indicatrices pretty well, as long as you draw them in before running the resize.

The biggest expense was installing the mantle ducts to keep the carbonate-silicate cycle operating.

The same goes for the one where you're wrestling the Green Ranger in the swimming pool full of Crisco. You guys all have that dream, right? It's not just me. Right?

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

'Dude, wait -- I'm not American! So my risk is basically zero!'

So far Voyager 1 has 'left the Solar System' by passing through the termination shock three times, the heliopause twice, and once each through the heliosheath, heliosphere, heliodrome, auroral discontinuity, Heaviside layer, trans-Neptunian panic zone, magnetogap, US Census Bureau Solar System statistical boundary, Kuiper gauntlet, Oort void, and crystal sphere holding the fixed stars.

It's hard to believe, but lots of kids these days ONLY know how to buy prepackaged molecules.

Changing the names would be easier, but if you're not comfortable lying, try only making friends with people named Alice, Bob, Carol, etc.

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

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

The xkcd.com sysadmin has a Q2010, and I can attest that it can handle a fall down several flight of concrete steps. Relatedly, he's upset with me -- I hope he doesn't take revenge by messing with my site's contenDISREGARD THAT I SUCK COCKS

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.

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

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."

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.

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

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

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

Love and circuit analysis, hand in hand at last.

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

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

[after a minute] "Okay, I think I've got it, thanks. Can I--" "oOOOooOOooo!"

'Why did you get into fluid dynamics?' 'Well, SOME planet has to have the coolest clouds, odds are it's not ours, and rockets are slow.'

I once got to second base with a basketball player. She was so confused.

NOTIFICATION: Now dismissing a head of the Notification Hydra… NOTIFICATION: Success! You have dismissed a head of the Notification Hydra!

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

I'm always disappointed when 'Anamorphic Widescreen' doesn't refer to a widescreen Animorphs movie.

The real key was inventing the windmill-powered winch.

<3 If there's anything you can do, I'll let you know. For the moment, any simple distracting online games sent to sick@xkcd.com will not go unappreciated [EDIT: Holy crap 2,700 games before noon. I love you guys; thank you. They will be passed along and played by us all.]

Hey, man, the 1670s called. They were like 'Wherefore this demonic inſtrument? By what ſorcery does it produce ſuch ſounds?"

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.

<A>: Like </a>this.

NOTE TO FUTURE ETYMONLINGUISTS: Our best guess is that 'blimp' is onomatopoeia. The 'B-Limp' thing is a folk etymology.

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

Ma'am, I admit that wasn't in the best taste, but you have to admire my delivery! Ha ha, get it? Oh God, don't throw those syringes! Your baby's fine!

After meeting with a few of the subjects, the IRB actually recommended that you stop stressing out so much about safety guidelines.

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

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

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

Collaborative editing can quickly become a textual rap battle fought with increasingly convoluted invocations of U+202a to U+202e.

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

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

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

"Actually, Jupiter already has a very impressive ring system!" --someone who knows Jupiter is within earshot

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.

It's amazing what it does for YouTube comments.

As my standard, I use going to sleep at midnight and waking up at 8 AM.

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.'

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

It's science!

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!

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.

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.

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."

After a while you adjust to the new cicadian rhythm.

Programming the sexbots to enjoy sex seemed a sensible move at the time, but we didn't realize the consequences of their developing fetishes.