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

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

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.

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

Although Kansas is widely thought to contain the geographic center of the contiguous 48 states, topologists now believe that it's actually their outer edge.

It's great for exfoliating your skin, bones, houses, cities, landscape, etc.

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

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

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

To be fair, the braised and confused newt on a bed of crushed Doritos turned out to be delicious.

This exotic blade was wrought from a different fallen star. The meteorite was a carbonaceous chondrite, so it's basically a lump of gravel glued into the shape of a sword. A SPACE sword!

Sure, we could stop dictators and pandemics, but we could also make the signs on every damn diagram make sense.

Unless the CS students finish the robot revolution before you finish the cephalopod one.

You want me to pick up waffle cones? Oh, right, for the wine. One sec, let me just derive your son's credit card number and I'll be on my way.

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

If physics had a mafia, I'm pretty sure the BICEP2 mess would have ended in bloodshed.

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

The Thirty Meter Telescope will be renamed The Flesh-Searing Eye on the Volcano.

I've developed a novel propulsion system powered by loss of precision in unit conversion.

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

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

When you get to hell, tell smallpox we say hello.

The most important attributes of a vector in 3-space are {Location, Location, Location}

BABIES OR LITERATURE BUT NOT BOTH: Baby shoes

You absolute-fucking-... shit.

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.

Whenever I miss a shot with a sci-fi weapon, I say 'Apollo retroreflector' really fast, just in case.

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

And a different ghost has replaced me in the bedroom.

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

Call me, MAYBE.

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.

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

Usain Bolt holds the world record in the 100 meter speedrun.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

If they're getting valuable enough stuff from you, at least the organized crime folks have an incentive to issue regular updates to keep the appliance working after the manufacturer discontinues support.

The rest is fear of raptors.

Friends with detriments.

Welcome to Wyoming, motto "We'd like to clarify that Cheyenne Mountain is in Colorado."

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

You think, 'okay, THIS is an ideal use case for hardlinks!' but then 6 months later you're doing some extremely cursed Google search like 'javascript ext4' and wondering where things went wrong.

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

Building codes in hurricane zones rely on studies of how easily flying debris can break residential windows. If you're looking for a science fair project idea and you hate your neighbors, I'm sure they could always use more data!

We're getting a lot of complaints from commuters who were routed onto a coaster, but the theme park patrons who spent hours stuck on an intercity line are also not happy.

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

Due to their proximity across the channel, there's long been tension between North Korea and the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Southern Ireland.

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

Are you the annoying spoon or the sleepy spoon?

[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)."

Most of our universe consists of dark matter rendered completely undetectable by our spacetime codec's dynamic range issues.

'Hello, Ghostbusters?' 'ooOOoooo people born years after that movie came out are having a second chiiiild right now ooOoooOoo'

Wait, that second one is a woman? ... wait, if that bothers me, then why doesn't ... man, this game is no fun anymore.

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

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.

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

I'm in talks with Netflix to produce an alternate-universe crime drama about the world where sliced bread was never re-legalized, but it's going slowly because they keep changing their phone numbers and the door lock codes at their headquarters.

CELEBRATE: Serve passengers tiered cakes shaped like the airspace class diagram

Cats can be smaller than the critical limit, but they're unobservable. If one shrinks enough that it crosses the limit, it just appears to get cuter and cuter as it slowly fades from view.

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

Though please do confirm that it's actually *me* on Klout first, and not one of my friends trying to get me punched. The great thing about this douchebag deadman switch is that I will never dare trigger it.

Oops, All Neutrons is also known as Neutral Quadrium, Nydnonen, and Goth Tritium.

Oh thank goodness, I forgot my clothes, so now everyone's looking embarrassed and backing away.

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

There's a version that shows the planets with no cropping, but it's hard to find a display that supports it.

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.

Let's invite him to a party and play 'I never'. Okay, I never hid any bodies SOUTH of Main Street. ... he's taking a drink!

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

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

I'm sure the building inspectors will approve my design once they finally manage to escape.

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

Inigo/Buttercup 4eva <3

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.

It's cool, it's totally ethical--they're all programmed to hunt whichever bird of prey is most numerous at the moment, so they leave the endangered ones alone until near the end.

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

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

The LEGO Group is already the world's largest tire manufacturer.

My optimizer uses content-aware inpainting to fill in all the wasted whitespace in the code, repeating the process until it compiles.

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

'Well, no further questions. You're hired!' 'Oh, sorry! I'm no longer interested. There's a bunch of future I gotta go check out!'

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

There's a supposed Mark Twain quote, "The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco." It isn't really by Mark Twain, but I don't know who said it—I just know they've never been to McMurdo Station.

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

I got lost and wandered into the world's creepiest cemetery, where the headstones just had names and star ratings. Freaked me out. When I got home I tried to leave the cemetery a bad review on Yelp, but as my hand hovered over the 'one star' button I felt this distant chill ...

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

Sometimes I'm terrified to realize how many options other people have.

You also refuse to buy Cisco products because you hate the Thong Song, O. Henry, Deep Space Nine, freshwater whitefish, teenaged Incan emperors, Brak's brother, and vegetable-based shortening.

Umwelt is the idea that because their senses pick up on different things, different animals in the same ecosystem actually live in very different worlds. Everything about you shapes the world you inhabit--from your ideology to your glasses prescription to your web browser.

"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."

And because if you just leave it there, it's going to start contaminating things downstream even if no one touches it directly.

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

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

A lot of these are actually non-venomous, but I can see which species you mistook them for. If you pause the crane for a sec I can give you some ID pointers for next time!

Yes you are! And you're sitting there! Hi, kitty!

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.

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

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

It's important to keep the spider from touching your face.

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

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

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

Stanford sleep researcher William Dement said that after 50 years of studying sleep, the only really solid explanation he knows for why we do it is 'because we get sleepy'.

After some account issues, we've added 6 new people from the beach house rental website support forum.

This is a story all about how I started drinking.

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

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

The bug report was marked 'could not reproduce'.

If you're 15 or younger, then just remember that it's nevertheless probably too late to be a child prodigy.

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

Does the screeching chill your blood and herald death? If yes, banshee. If no, seagull.

Actual quote from The Demo: '... an advantage of being online is that it keeps track of who you are and what you’re doing all the time ...'

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

Who's calling me?? WHY IS THE WORST PERSON IN THE WORLD CALLING ME!?

It's ok, I still have some nice, cool gas clouds that aren't collapsing. As long as nothing ionizes them, I can continue to enjoy their ... HEY! NO!!!

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.

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

CORRECTION: After careful evaluation, we have determined that the axis label on this chart was printed backward.

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

There are a lot of books on marketing out there. I wonder if you're safest just buying the most popular one.

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

You can do a lot better than 1% if you start keeping track of the patterns in what numbers people pick.

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

In my experience, mosquitos and poison ivy are bad, but the very worst itch comes from bites from chiggers (Trombicula alfreddugesi). They're found across the American south and great plains, so the best home remedy is to move to Iceland.

If long tooltips / cut off for you / then upgrade from / Firefox 2 / Burma Shave

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

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

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

They try to pad their numbers in the annual reports by counting Galileo's redundant systems as multiple computers, but they're falling behind badly either way.

"Hey guys! I have a great idea for a migration!" "Dammit, Kevin."

After determining that his body was full of pipes carrying iron-rich fluid, our current theory is that the dagger-shaped object precipitated within the wound.

If only we'd chosen 1944-12-02 08:45:52 as the Unix epoch, we could've combined two doomsday scenarios into one and added a really boring scene to that Roland Emmerich movie.

To compensate for this, I plan to spend 2013 doing nothing but talking about Mayans. My relationships with my friends and family may not fare well.

We don't sell products; we sell the marketplace. And by 'sell the marketplace' we mean 'play shooters, sometimes for upwards of 20 hours straight.'

Physicists who want to protect traditional Christmas realize that the only way to keep from changing Christmas is not to observe it.

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.

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

There are two types of dichotomy: False dichotomies, true dichotomies, and surprise trichotomies.

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.

DUCKLOOP'D?

Mr. Jones, watch out for Ms. Lenhart! She's from genus Photuris!

Goldilocks' discovery of Newton's method for approximation required surprisingly few changes.

Hi all, just replying to loop in *@outlook.com and *@yahoo.com.

The Hubble length is about 1.9 meters lying down; Edwin Hubble was a tall guy.

I've been working my way through this 1950s podcast by someone named John Tolkien called 'Lord of the Rings'--it's a deep dive into this fictional world he created. Good stuff, really bingeable!

I wanted us to try finding an approximate numeric solution, but noooo.

Right-click or long press (where supported) to save!

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

This medicine says it may cause lightheadedness, dry mouth, and blurred vision, but my head feels incredibly heavy, water is pouring from my mouth, and I can see individual hummingbird wingbeats, so I think I'm fine.

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

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

In addition to 'squishy', after reviewing my submitted intraplate ground motion data, the National Geodetic Survey has politely asked me to stop using the word 'supple' so often when describing Midwestern states.

Below the Web, and the Dark Web, a shadowy parallel world of Cybiko users trade messages on the Translucent Neon Plastic Web.

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

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.

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

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

I heard they might make the wild card game, which would be cool. Do you know when that is? I have a wedding next weekend, but if it's after that we could try to go!

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

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

PERPETUALLY OPTIMISTIC CASE: Early in the execution, our research group makes a breakthrough on proving P=NP.

She's so fat the attraction goes up as the CUBE of the distance instead of the square

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

If we get the doors open and plug up the dam on the Sirannon so the water rises a little, the pool will start draining into Moria. How do you think the Watcher would fare against a drenched Balrog?

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.

The experimental math department's budget is under scrutiny for how much they've been spending on trains leaving Chicago at 9:00pm traveling at 45 mph.

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

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

Also, we would really appreciate it if you could prominently refer to it as an 'eHit'.

This works on pretty much every level.

Brace yourself--the chirp gets pretty weird.

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

Sci-fi has energy weapons because otherwise the people like me who watch it get distracted counting shots.

I used to do this all the time.

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

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

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

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

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

If you live in Los Angeles (around 33°52'N, roughly the latitude of Hermosa Beach) the black hole in V404 Cygni passes over you each day. On Christmas Day it will be directly overhead around 2pm.

Grandma says that because of differences in primate and feline lifespans, the cat is actually my 17,000,000th cousin 14,000,000 times removed.

To get serious analyses of hurricanes and oil slicks, see Jeff Masters' blog. To get serious discussions of worst-case scenario thinking, see Bruce Schneier's blog. To get enough Vitamin D, don't read any blogs and go outside instead.

The average error in the NHC forecasted position of a hurricane three days in the future has shrunk to a third of what it was in 1990--a staggering accomplishment. However, as you may have gathered, forecasts of future storm *strength* have proved more difficult to improve.

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

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.

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

I'd traverse it myself, but it's singly linked, so I'm worried that I won't be able to find my way back to 2021.

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

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

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

The end.

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

Premed: "Does this count for a physics credit? Can we shorten the string so I can get it done faster? And can we do one where it hits me in the face? I gotta do a thing for first aid training right after."

We remember Rugrats, and think of them every time our kids look at us through their baby gates.

At some point, compression becomes an aesthetic design choice. Luckily, SVG is a really flexible format, so there's no reason it can't support vector JPEG artifacts.

Karpov's construction of a series of increasingly large rice cookers led to a protracted deadlock, but exponential growth won in the end.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

The misguided search for a perpetual motion machine has run substantially longer than any attempted perpetual motion machine.

I hear Steven Levitt is writing a book analyzing A.J. Jacobs' quest to spend a year reading everything Malcolm Gladwell ever wrote. The audiobook will be narrated by Robert Krulwich of Radiolab.

The Super Bowl is actually an elaborate ruse, concocted by a shadowy group in the mid sixties for this purpose. The 'watch it for the ads' addition was a master stroke.

In the LotR map, up and down correspond LOOSELY to northwest and southeast respectively.

Inside is a third box, labeled DO NOT OPEN UNLESS YOU ARE IN THE TIME ZONE WHERE YOU OPENED BOTH PREVIOUS BOXES.

The establishment doesn't take us seriously. You know who else they didn't take seriously? Hitler. I'll be like him, but a GOOD guy instead of...

Spherical or parabolic reflectors would of course lead to aberrant behavior.

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

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

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

"It's a little low for a weather balloon; it might be some other kind." "Yeah. Besides, I know I'm the alien conspiracy guy, but come on--the idea that the government would care about hiding something so mundane as atmospheric temperature measurement is too ridiculous even for me."

Took me five tries to find the right one, but I managed to salvage our night out--if not the boat--in the end.

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

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

'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.'

Revised directive: It is forbidden for you to interfere with human history until you've at least taken a class on it.

I'm trying to get the page locked because some jerk keeps adding "Yachts".

SPIDER PSYCHOLOGY (21st Ed.) is a comprehensive overview of arachnoneurology, neuro-arachnology, forensic arachnology, neuro-arachnoneurology (the study of the brains of spider neurology experts), and arachnoarachnology (the study of too many spiders).

They could afford to cut it close because they all had Global Entry.

Although it was a setback for physics, I'm glad the particle naming rights issue led to the cancelation of Pizza Hut's Superconducting Super Collider in the early 90s, so the Double Stuffed Extra Cheese Topping Quark ended up just being named 'top quark.'

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

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

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

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

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

Why couldn't the amulet have been hidden by Aunt Alice, who understands modern key exchange algorithms?

I'm not saying it's all bad, but that movie has not aged as well as my teenage self in 2000 was confident it would.

The articles are much shorter, but I assume that's because this version predates the merger with the Hawaiian text that created the modern Hawaiian-Greek hybrid wiki-pedia.

Theoretical physicist: At the Planck length, uncountably many.

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

"Epsihootamoo doopsiquorps" --the Schrödinger equation for the hydrogen atom

Some works didn't make the cut; in "Ecks vs. Sever" vs. the passage of time, the latter seems to have won pretty decisively.

If you think space elevators are good, but just too boring and practical, check out the 'space fountain'.

"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."

I didn't even know I *had* the Monty Python 'Lumberjack' song.

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

And sometimes I use it to retaliate against the guy upstairs with the loud girlfriend and the elliptical dish.

The contents of any one panel are dependent on the contents of every panel including itself. The graph of panel dependencies is complete and bidirectional, and each node has a loop. The mouseover text has two hundred and forty-two characters.

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.

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

Thank you to Gretchen McCulloch for fielding this question, and sorry that as a result the world's foremost internet linguist has been devoured by the brown one. She will be missed.

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

A blow from Emmy's Cutlass of Variations will transport the dragon to a corresponding symmetric position in the Noetherworld.

'... hosts were unexpectedly fired from ABC's 'The View' today. ABC will likely announce new ...'

I'd like to see more damage assessments for hurricanes hitting New York and flooding Manhattan -- something like the 1938 Long Island Express, but aimed a bit more to the west. It's just a matter of time.

The draw-by-repetition rule does a good job of keeping players from sliding a tile back and forth repeatedly, but the tiles definitely introduce some weird en passant and castling edge cases.

Can you pass the nackle?

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

The biggest I've seen in a published source in the wild is an 80-fold error in a reported distance, which I think came from a series of at least three unit conversions and area/length misinterpretations.

"I've traveled here from the year 2020 to bring you this vaccine!"

I liked the idea, suggested by h00k on bash.org, of a Twitter bot that messages prominent politicians to tell them when they've unnecessarily used sms-speak abbreviations despite having plenty of characters left.

Washable, though only once.

Are you still there, server? It's me, Margaret.

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

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

[other side] If the first word of an instruction you're given starts with the same letter as your crush's name, for that step imagine the experimenter is your crush.

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

Well, she's pretty hot.

I was going to be a scientist, but that seems silly now. Magical worlds exist. I've learned a huge truth about our place in the universe. I'm supposed to care about college? I mean, FUCK.

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

To everyone who responds to everything by saying they've 'lost their faith in humanity': Thanks--I'll let humanity know. I'm sure they'll be crushed.

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.

Bruce Schneier believes safewords are fundamentally insecure and recommends that you ask your partner to stop via public key signature.

Bean actually sabotaged it just to give Dink the excuse to make that joke.

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

P.S. If you have time travel, come to my birthday party Saturday!

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

Before I install any patch, I always open the patch notes and Ctrl-F for 'supervolcano', 'seagull', and 'garbage disposal', just to be safe.

When putting his kids to bed, after saying 'Goodnight', Obama has to stop himself from saying 'God bless you, and God bless the United States of America.'

<A>: Like </a>this.

For the moment it's a standoff

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

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

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

I just want to stay up long enough to watch the ball drop into the hole number 2018.

The Greeks long suspected this, but it wasn't until April 12th of 1882 that Ferdinand von Lindemann conclusively proved it when he constructed himself the most awesome birthday party possible and nobody showed up.

There's this idea that emoji are bad for communication because they replace ambiguity and nuance with a limited set of preselected emotions, but it doesn't really survive a collision with real-world usage of the thinking face or upside-down smiley.

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

Every choice, no matter how small, begins a new story.

Stay right there, we'll be back in a minute. We've just gotta brainstorm some new wonders. Have you all figured out gears yet? Yes? Crap.

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!'

♫ When the spacing is tight / And the difference is slight / That's a moiré ♫

If you're really savvy, you can hide an entire set of illicit transactions by timing them to draw what looks like a graph inset.

It's a long way down.

Yes, there are a lot of longing looks across the bridge of Galactica first, but that's beside the point!

Shoot for the Moon. If you miss, you'll end up co-orbiting the Sun alongside Earth, living out your days alone in the void within sight of the lush, welcoming home you left behind.

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

Obviously battery technology and prices have driven a lot of the scooter explosion, but I feel like Dean Kamen must be at least a little grumpy about how much people laughed at the idea of the Segway.

There were traffic jams for the eclipses in 1970 and 1979, and that was *before* we had the potential for overnight viral social media frenzies.

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

You ARE getting older, though.

And even when they're not distracted, they usually get kicked out for illegal under-the-net 'subduction spikes'.

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

The package weighs 7 kg 9 oz.

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.

I was there, dude.

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!

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

I sort of wish my texting app showed the percentage next to each person, but also sort of don't want to know.

The secret fourth kind is 'we applied a standard theory to their map of every tree and got some suspicious results.'

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.

Pythagorean means are nice and all, but throwing the median in the pot is really what turns this into random forest statistics: applying every function you can think of, and then gradually dropping the ones that make the result worse.

Don't worry! From the light's point of view, home and your eye are in the same place, and the journey takes no time at all! Relativity saves the day again.

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.

Mal, Simon, Wash, Zoe, River, Kaylee, Jayne, Inara, Book.

There's been a raccoon accident at an accordion bacchanalia! Double doses!

Obama has been writing Lincoln/Obama erotic fan fiction on his secret livejournal. Excerpt: Lincoln lay back on the bed, nude save for his trademark stovepipe hat. 'Tell me,' he purred seductively, as he and Obama formed a more perfect union. 'When you come, is it 10% ethanol?'

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

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

It was great until my thumb slipped and I accidentally launched my telescope into the air at Mach 8.

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

I mean, seriously, NOWHERE? For starters, there are like a thousand species of dinosaur.

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

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

My brother had a ferret he loved which died since I drew this strip. RIP.

Seriously considering buying some illegal drugs to try to turn them back into cold medicine.

The xkcd Survey: Big Data for a Big Planet

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

The only things you HAVE to know are how to make enough of a living to stay alive and how to get your taxes done. All the fun parts of life are optional.

"Wait, we've MOVED since 2010. How on Earth did--" "Look, some of us were just born to be champions."

It's important for devices to have internet connectivity so the manufacturer can patch remote exploits.

I felt so clever when I found a way to game the Fitocracy system by incorporating a set of easy but high-scoring activities into my regular schedule. Took me a bit to realize I'd been tricked into setting up a daily exercise routine.

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

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

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

Day six: 'The hell? Who mails a bobcat?'

Protip: Even without the red spiders, never have that conversation halfway through a balloon ride.

Once, long ago, I saw this girl go by. I didn't stop and talk to her, and I've regretted it ever since.

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

40 digits: You are optimistic about our understanding of the nature of distance itself.

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

I honestly didn't think you could even USE emoji in variable names. Or that there were so many different crying ones.

Merry Christmas from xkcd!

I think I see a Mandelbrot set! No, that's just blood splatters. Golly.

Hey! A bunch of the early Cretaceous fossils on each coast seem to have been plagiarized, too!

This was my friend David's idea

If you're interested in the subject, Lawrence Lessig's 'Free Culture' is pretty good

It hurts to be hit there, you know

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

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

Otherwise known as Margaret the Destroyer, I will bring pain to the the Great One. Then again, maybe I won't.

I call Rule 34 on Wolfram's Rule 34.

I know it seems overwhelming, but don't worry; I'm sure most of them have only a few stars, and probably no planets.

There are so many well-meaning conservatives around here who just assume global warming is only presented as a moral issue for political reasons.

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

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

Not shown: the approximately 30,000 identical, vaguely hysterical articles titled "WHITE PEOPLE IN [THE US/BRITAIN] TO BECOME MINORITY BY [YEAR]!", which came up for basically any year I put in.

"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"

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

Within a few minutes, our roads will be full of uncontrollably-swerving cars and our skies full of Amazon delivery dogs.

"Some people say light is waves, and some say it's particles, so I bet light is some in-between thing that's both wave and particle depending on how you look at it. Am I right?" "YES, BUT YOU SHOULDN'T BE!"

Also, all financial analysis. And, more directly, D&D.

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

'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.'

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

Cue angry letters from all seven fans of Xenocide.

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

Pool on the roof must've sprung a leak.

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

Excellent recovery: ... which we could try to use to somehow save your original brother!

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

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

I wish I knew how to quit this so I wouldn't have to quit you.

Medium: Pencil on paper

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

To really expand your mind try some noncartesian porn. Edwin Abbot Abbott has nothing on 'Girls on Girls in Tightly Closed Nonorientable Spaces'.

Disappointed that they caved to fan pressure and went with Ruth Bader Ginsburg over Elena Kagan.

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

I just can't wait for the Better Homes and Gardens list of helpful tips for household reuse of sixteen-inch acrylonitrile-butadiene-styrene phalluses.

Although ... who else can't wait for them to incorporate that Wiimote head-tracking stuff into games? Man, the future's gonna be *awesome*.

Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can make me think I deserved it.

To anyone I've taken on a terrible date, this is retroactively my cover story.

Conveniently for everyone, it turns out that dark energy is produced by subterranean parasitoid wasps.

The most ridiculous offender of all is the sudoers man page, which for 15 years has started with a 'quick guide' to EBNF, a system for defining the grammar of a language. 'Don't despair', it says, 'the definitions below are annotated.'

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

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

'How could you possibly think typing 'import skynet' was a good idea?'

AAAAAA A ÃA̧AȂA̦ ǍÅÂÃĀÁȂ AAAAAAA!

It's very hard to detect, but recent studies have determined that when plasma B cells are producing antibodies, they go 'pew pew pew'

Don't fire until you see through the fragile facade to the human being within.

It's actually worst in people who study the Dunning–Kruger effect. We tried to organize a conference on it, but the only people who would agree to give the keynote were random undergrads.

'There's also a spike on the Fourier transform at the one-month mark where --' 'You want to stop talking right now.'

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

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

Two Hedwig references, an obscure Joey Comeau reference, and a girl with a mohawk. Yes.

LIFEHACKS: You can just take all the luggage off the airport conveyer belt and leave with it. They don't check that it's yours at the door!

Although not permanently.

I've seen advertisers put their URLs on chalkboards, encircled with a DNE. They went unerased for months. If you see this, feel free to replace the URL with xkcd.com.