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

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She's pretty sharp when provoked.

Once you see it, you can't help seeing it every time. Until your body finishes metabolizing the mushrooms.

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."

What I really want is to hang out where I hung out with my friends in college, but have all my older relatives there too.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

Just tell me everything you're thinking about in order from most important to last, and then we'll be friends and we can eat apples together.

Ok, so Spirit and Opportunity are pretty awesome. And Kepler. And New Horizons, Cassini, Curiosity, TiME, and Project M. But c'mon, if the Earth were a basketball, in 40 years no human's been more than half an inch from the surface.

It's nice how the end of the periodic table is flush with the edge these days, so I think we should agree no one should find any new elements after #118 unless they discover a whole row at once.

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

The great thing is, the sentence is really just a reminder to the listener to worry about whatever aspects of the technology they're already feeling alarmist about, which in their mind gives you credit for addressing their biggest anxieties.

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

Our work has produced great answers. Now someone just needs to figure out which questions they go with.

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

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

Juraaaassic Park, Juraaaassic Park, God shed his grace on theeeee

"Also, reading 500 coronavirus papers in a row and not sleeping? Probably not great for you either, but I haven't found any studies confirming that yet. I'll keep looking."

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

Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they should, they didn't stop to think if they could.

But to us there is but one God, plus or minus one. --1 Corinthians 8:6±2.

Add main-belt asteroids to taste.

If you're going to let it burn up, make sure it happens over the deep end of the bathtub and not any populated parts of the house!

The IAU is sad to announce that at 00:39 UTC on December 22nd, Jupiter and Saturn did unfortunately come into contact, and appear to have blooped together.

Using a ring to bind someone you covet into your dark and twisted world? Wow, just got the subtext there. Also, the apparently eager Beyoncé would've made one badass Nazgȗl.

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

The xkcd Survey: Big Data for a Big Planet

A long, long time (plus 40 years) ago, in a galaxy far, far away (plus a corrective factor involving the Hubble constant) ...

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.

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.

My bold criticism might anger the hot air balloon people, which would be a real concern if any of them lived along a very narrow line directly upwind of me.

Fortunately, after a brief skirmish, I seem to have gained the upper hand in the battle against my internal organs, at least until they learn to read and find out the mean stuff I've said about them.

The same people who spend their weekends at the Blogger Reenactment Festivals will whine about the anachronisms in historical movies, but no one else will care.

So do you have any plans for z=-0.000000000000045?

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

It ships with a version of Google Now that alerts you when it's too late to leave for your appointments.

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

An occasional source of mild Thanksgiving tension in my family is that my mother is a die-hard fan of The Core (2003), and various family members sometimes have differing levels of enthusiasm for her annual tradition of watching it.

I get that there are security reasons for the schedule, but this is like the ONE problem we have where the right answer is both easy and straightforward. If we can't figure it out, maybe we should just give up and just replace all the portraits on the bills with that weird pyramid eye thing.

At the bottom left: The mystery of why, when I know I needed to be asleep an hour ago, I decide it's a good time to read through every Wikipedia article in the categories 'Out-of-place artifacts', 'Earth mysteries', 'Anomalous weather', and 'List of people who disappeared mysteriously'.

The Romeo and Butt-Head film actually got two thumbs up from Siskel and Oates.

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

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

The 95% confidence interval suggests Rexthor's dog could also be a cat, or possibly a teapot.

Perhaps you need a crash course in taking hints. Here's your first lesson: We're not actually walking somewhere together; I'm trying to leave this conversation and you're following me.

That card holds a refrigerator carton's worth of floppy discs, and a soda can full of those cards could hold the entire iTunes store's music library. Mmmm.

Well, for some value of 'actually work'.

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 slowly dawns on us that our parents knew exactly what they were doing.

I tried oxidizing them, but your bank uses some really weird paper and it wouldn't light.

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

ADDITIONAL NOTES: Fixed a bug that caused some rocks to generate virtually infinite heat while just sitting there.

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

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.

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

The Pioneer anomaly is due to the force of my love.

Hey! No running in the back-arc basin!

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

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

Some future reader, who may see the term, without knowing the history of it, may imagine that it had reference to some antiquated bridge of the immortal Poet, thrown across the silver Avon, to facilitate his escape after some marauding excursion in a neighbouring park; and in some Gentleman's Magazine of the next century, it is not impossible, but that future antiquaries may occupy page after page in discussing so interesting a matter. We think it right, therefore, to put it on record in the Oriental Herald that the 'Shakesperian Rope Bridges' are of much less classic origin; that Mr Colin Shakespear, who, besides his dignity as Postmaster, now signs himself 'Superintendent General of Shakesperian Rope Bridges', is a person of much less genius than the Bard of Avon. --The Oriental Herald, 1825

No, of course we don't microwave the mug WITH the teabag in it. We microwave the teabag separately.

Opening dialogue by Scott

I think the IETF hit the right balance with the 128 bits thing. We can fit MAC addresses in a /64 subnet, and the nanobots will only be able to devour half the planet.

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

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.

Assume r' refers to the radius of Earth Prime, and r'' means radius in inches.

90% of the iceberg is hidden beneath the water, but that 90% only uses 10% of its brain, so it's really only 9%.

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

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

The only other person to walk by was a linguist back in the 80s, but she just spent a while dissecting the phrase 'help me down' before getting distracted by a squirrel and wandering off.

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

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

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

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).

Take me down to the paradise municipality / where the grass is mauve and the girls aren't fromthisreality.

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

I plugged in this lamp and my dog went rigid, spoke a sentence of perfect Akkadian, and then was hurled sideways through the picture window. Even worse, it's one of those lamps where the switch is on the cord.

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.

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

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

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

I wish I'd missed you then so I wouldn't be missing you now

[earlier] "Your vintage-style handmade chest business is struggling. But I have a plan."

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

As always, you are permitted to call one person for guidance, but that person must be a grandparent.

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

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

[20 minutes later] ", hi."

Click and drag.

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

I first saw this problem on the Google Labs Aptitude Test. A professor and I filled a blackboard without getting anywhere. Have fun.

I'm staring at the "doctor" section, and I can't help but feel like I've forgotten someone.

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

There's always the hope that if you sit and watch for long enough, the beachball will vanish and the thing it interrupted will return.

This was my friend David's idea

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

The problem with perspective is that it's bidirectional.

Real-life prospective-pairing curves over things like age can get depressing.

And they choose Al Gore as Internet Secretary.

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

In Connor's second thesis it is stated 'There is no fate but what we make for ourselves.' Does the routine destroy our creativity or do we lose creativity and fall into the routine? Anyway, who's up for a road trip!

Psychology researchers say our 'flashbulb' memories of big events can be unreliable, but I clearly remember watching live on CNN as Challenger crashed into and destroyed the Berlin Wall.

The other great lakes are just water on the far side of Canada Island. If you drive north from the Pacific northwest you actually cross directly into Alaska, although a few officials--confused by the Mercator distortion--have put up border signs.

Hey guys! What's eating you? Ha ha ha it's me! Oh, what fun we have.

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

HACK THE STARS

The distinction between a ship and a boat is a line drawn in water.

"This will take a while, which sucks, because I'm already so busy chiseling out igneous intrusions from rock formations and watching Youtube loops of the Superman fault-sealing scene over and over."

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

People go to the website because they can't wait for the next alumni magazine, right? What do you mean, you want a campus map? One of our students made one as a CS class project back in '01! You can click to zoom and everything!

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

First person to bring me Wayne Coyne in a hamster ball gets a free t-shirt! He gets one too.

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

If you read all vaguebooking/vaguetweeting with the assumption that they're saying everything they can without revealing classified military information, the internet gets way more exciting.

Corollary to Hofstadter's Law: Every minute you spend thinking about Hofstadter's Law is a minute you're NOT WORKING AND WILL NEVER FINISH! PAAAAAANIIIIIIC!

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

Sometimes, you have to sacrifice pieces to gain the advantage. Sometimes, to advance ... you have to fall back.

It's definitely not the time to try drinking beer before liquor.

Pontoon bridges are just linear open-sided waterbeds.

Are Your Teens Practicing Amplexus? Learn These Six Telltale Signs!

Then I'm going to go on a weeks-long somatic hypermutation bender, producing ever-more targeted antibodies, while I continue to remain distanced and follow guidance from public health authorities.

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

Now, if it were the *Canon* wiki, it's possible to imagine someone with a productivity-related reason for consulting it, but no one's job requires them to read that much about Admiral Daala.

Don't worry--you're less likely to die from a space launch than from a shark attack. The survival rate is pretty high for both!

Paleontologists have long worried that the dinosaurs blasted into space 66 million years ago will one day complete their orbits and fall back down.

Who can forget the early 2010s memes? 'You know you're a 90s kid if you remember the feeling of warm sunlight on your face.' 'Only 90s kids remember the dawn.'

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

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

With a good battery, the device can easily last for 5 or 10 years, although the walls probably won't.

"There's one set of foot-p's cause I was totes carrying you, bro!" said Jesus seconds before I punched him.

[audience looks around] 'What just happened?' 'There must be some context we're missing.'

YEEEEEEAAAAAAHHHHHH!

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

'This space intentionally left blank' is less immediately provocative but more Hofstadterially confusing.

If you pick a low enough orbit, it gives you a lot of freedom to use a lightweight launch vehicle such as a stepladder.

To ensure lasting immunity, doctors recommend destroying a second Death Star some time after the first.

I don't want to talk about it

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

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

They eventually resolved this self-reference, but Cantor's 'everything-in-the-fetish-book-twice' parties finally sunk the idea.

Even if you said you were an employee of the website, if you asked for my password, I'd tell you.

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

Sweet unintersecting dreams!

A century later, the harrowing flight of the survivors from Oregon was dramatized in a popular video game.

I was almost fired from a job driving the hearse in funeral processions, but then the funeral home realized how much business I was creating for them.

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

I'm as surprised as you!

Unfortunately, NASA regulations state that Bertrand Russell-related payloads can only be launched within launch vehicles which do not launch themselves.

I don't know about houseflies, but we definitely caught a lot of fruit flies with our vinegar bowl. Hooray science!

We trained it to produce data that looked convincing, and we have to admit the results look convincing!

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

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.

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

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

The best case is O(n), and the worst case is that someone checks why.

Why did the chicken cross the road? It begins over five thousand years ago with the domestication of the red junglefowl in southeast Asia and the development of paved roads in the Sumerian city of Ur.

"Okay, that was weird, but the product reveal was normal. I think the danger is pas--" "One more thing." "Oh no."

On one hand, every single one of my ancestors going back billions of years has managed to figure it out. On the other hand, that's the mother of all sampling biases.

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.

'The zero line in WMM2025 passes through a lot of population centers; I wonder what year the largest share of the population lived in a zone of less than 5° of declination,' he thought, derailing all other tasks for the rest of the day.

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

... I wanna try. Hang on, be right back.

In addition to gravity, burritos interact through the strong, weak, and electromagnetic forces, which is believed to be a major contributor to their popularity.

It wasn't originally constitutionally required, but presidents who served two terms have traditionally followed George Washington's example and gotten false teeth.

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.

ONE LAPTOP PER HAMSTER!

When we take into account the recent discovery of previously-unstudied history in the 1750s, this year may have been an outright loss.

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!

A leading expert characterized the situation as 'retarded'

What an incredible smell you've discovered.

A hydroelectric dam is also known as a heavy water reactor.

Roundly-condemned headlinese initiative shuttered indefinitely.

[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.

I don't care what the research says. Everybody knows you should drink 3,000 glasses of water a day and change your oil every 8 miles.

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

My icebox plum trap easily captured William Carlos Williams. It took much less work than the infinite looping network of diverging paths I had to build in that yellow wood to ensnare Robert Frost.

I haven't had the patience for RPGs in a long time.

I think Voyager 1 would be just past the event horizon, but slightly less than halfway to the bright ring.

Anna Karenina is a happy family lumper and unhappy family splitter.

I've looked through a few annotated versions of classic books, and it's shocking how much of what's in there is basically pop-culture references totally lost on us now.

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

Squaring the circle is really easy with some good clamps.

$The exact cause of the phenomenon is unknown, but it's thought to be linked to atmospheric refraction and you getting a really cool car.$

The retina is the exposed surface of the brain, so if you think about a pot of gold while looking at a rainbow, then there's one at BOTH ends.

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.

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

Further research is needed to fully understand how we managed to do such a good job.

Scholars are still debating whether the current period is post-postmodern or neo-contemporary.

The foil on the toothpick represents the blue flash.

Unfortunately, SawStart is one-use-only. Once started, the blade cannot be stopped, and must be replaced with a fresh blade while the running one is carefully disposed of.

I would say time is definitely one of my top three favorite dimensions.

I've just received word that the Emperor has dissolved the MIT computer science program permanently.

After exhausting the OED, we started numbering them. When overlapping hurricanes formed at all points on the Earth's surface, and our scheme was foiled by Cantor diagonalization, we just decided to name them all "Steve". Your local forecast tomorrow is "Steve". Good luck.

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

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

Charles, I just talked to John and Mildred, who run that company selling seeds and nuts, and their kids with MOUTHS are starving!

And what about all the people who won't be able to join the community because they're terrible at making helpful and constructive co-- ... oh.

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

I was really impressed by the accuracy of some of the report's predictions about fossil fuel consumption. Then I realized, oh, right, of course.

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

To get more knowledge

P((B|A)|(A|B)) represents the probability that you'll mix up the order of the terms when using Bayesian notation.

Wait, what do you mean, 'dark matter'? It's not dark, it interacts with high-energy gamma rays ... right? Oh jeez, did I forget to make it interact?

There's data suggesting that this model may apply to deep-dish/thin-crust pizza. I've designed a thorough multi-year study to investigate this personally, but funding organizations keep denying my grant requests.

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

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.

"You still can't walk into someone's house without being invited!" "What? Oh, I see your confusion. No, this vaccine is for a bat VIRUS. I'm fine with doorways and garlic and stuff."

It's not far from the sign marking the exact latitude and longitude of the Earth's core.

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

The 8th panel is my favorite

Benthic Santas weren't even discovered until the 1970s, but many scientists now believe Christmas may have originally developed around hydrothermal vents and only later migrated to the surface.

"You should make it so people can search for and jump into hundreds of conversations at once if they want." "Ooh, good idea! I imagine only the most well-informed people with the most critical information to share will use that feature."

(1) That shopping cart is full of AirHeads, and (2) I died at 41 from what the AirHeads company spokesperson called 'probably natural causes.'

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

Even geology papers about Heart Mountain are like, "Look, we all agree this 'volcanic gas earthquake hovercraft' thing seems like it can't possibly be right, but..."

WARNING: PEOPLE NAMED EVE ARE PROHIBITED FROM INSTALLING THIS APP!

No one likes my novelty ringtone, an audio recording of a phone on vibrate sitting on a hard surface.

And now I might never get to again.

In Dimensional Chess, every move is annotated '?!'.

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

But if you unplug everything, it gets so quiet you hear that high-pitched empty-room hum. And then the whispers begin.

Someone should really bring them a ladder and remind them to build the Endless Stair *first* next time.

Things are rarely just crazy enough to work, but they're frequently just crazy enough to fail hilariously.

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

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

Bacteria still outweigh us thousands to one--and that's not even counting the several pounds of them in your body.

We live in a world where there are actual fleets of robot assassins patrolling the skies. At some point there, we left the present and entered the future.

My MRI research shows a clear correlation between the size of the parietal lobe--the part of the brain that handles spatial reasoning--and enjoyment of 3D Doritos®.

I tried uploading it to a household appliance porn site I found, but apparently their content is limited to only fans.

It IS about physics. It ALL is.

Actually, the fact that Mars is still orbiting safely over here means that it was technically an *Euler* apocalypse, not a Venn one.

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

Medium: Pencil on paper

I thought of another bad opinion! I couldn't find anyone who expressed it specifically, but still, the fact that I can so easily imagine it is infuriating! I'm gonna tell everyone about it!

PROTIP: You can get around the Shannon-Hartley limit by setting your font size to 0.

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

We were able to replicate and confirm prior authors' detection of a moon orbiting the Earth with high confidence.

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.

"Measure zero times, cut zero times." --carpenter who has achieved enlightenment and realized the wood is fine where it is

It's pi plus C, of course.

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

"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"

A 5% efficiency gain at the cost of a 99% efficiency loss

If you want to see true audacity, do an image search for 'Altoona-style pizza.'

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

Two tips: 1) 8675309 is not just prime, it's a twin prime, and 2) if you ever find yourself raising log(anything)^e or taking the pi-th root of anything, set down the marker and back away from the whiteboard; something has gone horribly wrong.

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

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.

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

Once you add the balloons into the model, it makes forecasting easier overall--the forecast is always 'cold and dark, with minimal solar-driven convection.'

Linguists, settling some inscrutable grudge, have been steadily sneaking more backdated synonyms for 'sharing borders' into the dictionary. They've added 'contiguous,' 'coterminous,' 'conterminous,' and next year they're adding 'conterguous.'

That one is a variable star which pulses every 30 seconds. Its name comes from a Greek word meaning "smoke alarm."

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.

Magnetohydrodynamics combines the intuitive nature of Maxwell's equations with the easy solvability of the Navier-Stokes equations. It's so straightforward physicists add "relativistic" or "quantum" just to keep it from getting boring.

For even more info, see blarbl(2)(3) and birb(3ahhaha I'm kidding, just Google it like a normal person.

'Big Data' doesn't just mean increasing the font size.

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

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.

Freestyle rapping is basically applied Markov chains.

At least they're not alone down there.

The hardest refresh requires both a Mac keyboard and a Windows keyboard as a security measure, like how missile launch systems require two keys to be turned at once.

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

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

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

We understand your privacy concerns; be assured that our phones will never store or transmit images of your face.

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

But listen, if getting your car out from under the pile is REALLY important to you, we do have an axe you can borrow.

Before you say anything, no, I know not to leave my computer sitting out logged in to all my accounts. I have it set up so after a few minutes of inactivity it automatically switches to my brother's.

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

Technically DC isn't a state, but no one is too pedantic about it because they don't want to disturb the snakes.

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

Alexa defeated her in a battle hinging on the ability to set multiple timers.

You know I've always hated her.

I wonder how often Patrick Stewart has Darmok flashbacks when talking to Star Trek fans.

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

Not to go all sentence fragment on you.

Thank you for teaching us how big our world is by sharing so many of your own.

Opening dialogue by Scott

Dr. Petroff has also shown that the Higgs boson signal was actually sparks from someone microwaving grapes, the EHT black hole photo was a frozen bagel someone left in too long, and the LIGO detection was just someone slamming the microwave door too hard.

Cesium-133, let it be. Cesium-134, let it be even more.

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

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

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

A partial eclipse is like a cool sunset. A total eclipse is like someone broke the sky.

The problems started with my resolution next year to reject temporal causality.

[bzzzt] "REMEMBER TO CHECK IN FOR YOUR FLIGHT TO LONDON." "My wha-" [bzzzt] "YOUR UBER WILL ARRIVE IN FOUR MINUTES."

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

I'm not very good at meeting people.

Personally I think mercury is more of a 'wet earth' hybrid element.

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

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

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

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

"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."

Gödel should do an article on which branches of math have the lowest average theorem number.

cerebrospinal fluid, pericardial fluid, sputum, aqueous humor, perilymph, chyme, hydatid fluid, interstitial fluid, rheum, and gin.

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

We were disappointed that the rocket didn't make a THOOOONK noise when it went into the tube, but we're setting up big loudspeakers for future launches to add the sound effect.

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

'Will [ ] allow us to better understand each other and thus make war undesirable?' is one that pops up whenever we invent a new communication medium.

Each particle also has a password which allows its properties to be changed, but the cosmic censorship hypothesis suggests we can never observe the password itself—only its secure hash.

This replaces the previous solar activity watch, which was issued last month when the sun took off its sunglasses.

You can pour a drink into it while hosting a party, although it's a real pain to fit in the dishwasher afterward.

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.

I mean, it's not like we could just demand to see the code that's governing our lives. What right do we have to poke around in Facebook's private affairs like that?

There's a cool mental calculation hack I recently learned for this: If you open the calendar app on your phone or computer, the highest-numbered box along the bottom is equal to the number of days in the month!

Obligatory bad guy: This operation is sheer foolishness, and it's not happening on my watch! Mainly because I can't figure out how to adjust the time.

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

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

Many things about Star Wars were not well planned out, but having a 37-year-old in old-age makeup play the Emperor in Return of the Jedi was such an incredible call.

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

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!

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

Worries assuaged, the numbers become less important than your touches.

This is probably the first projection in cartographic history that can be criticized for its disproportionate focus on Finland, Mongolia, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

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

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

Funding was quickly restored to the NHC and the APA was taken back off hurricane forecast duty.

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

You know that 'sweep the pieces off the board and see it in your mind' thing? Doesn't work.

Earth clearly hasn't been inspected, since it's definitely contaminated with salmonella.

When you talk about the job experience you'll give me, why do you pronounce 'job' with a long 'o'?

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

I could type this into a solver, which MIGHT help, but would also mean I have to get a lot of parentheses right...

Maybe there's no tenderness in her fingertips either, but at least SHE puts out.

Maybe I should've tried Wexler?

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).

Stockfish 16 suggests the unconventional opening 1. RuntimeError: Out of bounds memory access

"I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on Venus and returning him safely to--" [an aide frantically whispers in the president's ear for a moment] "... of landing a man on Venus."

Aaron Sorkin has been tapped to write the TV movie about the aging prince's eventual election to Pat Toomey's Senate seat, currently titled either 'FRESHman Senator' or 'Mr. Smith Goes to Washington'.

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

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

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

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.'

Last week, we busted the myth that electroweak gauge symmetry is broken by the Higgs mechanism. We'll also examine the existence of God and whether true love exists.

I guess I need to apologize to my parents, friends, and the staff at Chuck E. Cheese's for all the times I called the cops on them.

I hear that there are actual lyrics later on in Land of 1,000 Dances, but other than the occasional 'I said,' I've never listened long enough to hear any of them.

I tried converting the prices into pizzas, to put it in more familiar terms, and it just became a hard-to-think-about number of pizzas.

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

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

There's also a proof without content of a conjecture without content, but it's left as an exercise for the reader.

These new Bluetooth socks are great, but it's troubling to learn that I average almost 14 hours of Shoe Time a day.

Nature abhors a vacuum and also anything that's not a crab.

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

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

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

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

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.

This is also one of only five identified situations in which a vuvuzela is actually appropriate.

It was also fun when those teenagers tried to egg our house and it insta-cooked the eggs in mid-air.

Serve one each to guests whose last cursed cocktail was more than 2 months ago.

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

It's basically Pascal's Wager for the paranoid prankster.

The worst are graphs with qualitative, vaguely-labeled axes and very little actual data.

The invisible hand of the market never texts me back.

All music is just performances of 4'33" in studios where another band happened to be playing at the time.

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

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

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.

The bottom of the list remains unchanged. Poor Rutherford Birchard Hayes.

I'm working on assembling a combination declinometer, sclerometer, viscometer, aleurometer, stalagmometer, and hypsometer. I'm making good progress according to my ometerometer, a device which shows the rate at which I'm acquiring measurement devices.

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

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

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

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

Socrates could've saved himself a lot of trouble if he'd just brought a flashlight, tranquilizer gun, and a bunch of rescue harnesses.

I believe in getting immunity the old-fashioned way: By letting a bat virus take control of my lungs and turn my face into a disgusting plague fountain while my immune system desperately Googles 'how to make spike protein antibodies'.

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

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

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.

Gotten the Ferris wheel operator's attention

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 ...

Just make sure you don't have it maximize instead of minimize.

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

They say it's probably safe to keep orbiting for a while, but if it stays on or starts flashing we might have to call someone.

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

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

Evolutionarily speaking, mushrooms are technically a type of ghost.

After a while, the squirrel starts making that beeping noise and doesn't stop until it hops back up onto the stump.

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

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

They might make it past that first line of defense. For the second, you'll need some picture frames, a level, and a protractor that can do increments of less than a degree.

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

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

In protest of SOPA, I'm currently getting totally blacked out.

PYTHON FLAG ENABLE THREE LAWS

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

I wonder what I was dreaming to prompt that. I hope it wasn't the Richard Stallman Cirque de Soleil thing again.

I'm just worried that we'll all leave and you won't get to come along!

My parents sent me to several years of intensive Kix test prep.

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

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

Haha, just kidding, everyone's already been hacked. I wonder if today's the day we find out about it.

::click:: Come back! You didn't see the one of Whistler's mother!

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>.