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

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My favorite might be U+1F609 U+1F93F WINKING FACE VOMITING.

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!

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.

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

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.

If you're not completely satisfied with the phone after 30 days, we will return you to your home at no cost.

The typical Shadow Biology Department is housed in a building coated in a thin layer of desert varnish which renders it invisible to normal-world university staff.

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

U+2A0B ⨋ Mathematicians need to calm down

Anyone else watching this Youtube video in 1954? If so, my last trip definitely messed with the timeline.

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

This rumpled fabric at the corner looks like evidence of ongoing tectonic activity.

The Hammer + Captain Tightpants == Captain Hammerpants?

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

Vanilla Ice was produced in small quantities for years, but it wasn't until the 90s that experimenters collaborated to produce a sample that could survive at room temperature for several months.

Bald-faced hornets are only a 2 on the Schmidt pain index, so I shouldn't complain. The tennis ball ejected from the dryer exhaust vent could have ricocheted off the nest of a much higher-scoring insect before knocking me off the ladder. Really, I'm lucky.

I'M SORRY, FROM YOUR YEARS OF CONDESCENDING TOWARD THE 'SQUISHY SCIENCES', I ASSUMED YOU'D BE A LITTLE HARDER.

To combat the threat, many airlines are installing wing-mounted spray bottles.

"Seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, twenty--" / "Can't we just read Pat the Bunny?"

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

I spent a long time thinking about how to design a system for long-term organization and storage of subject-specific informational resources without needing ongoing work from the experts who created them, only to realized I'd just reinvented libraries.

Building Inspectors HATE This One Weird Trick

So as not to leave you hanging -- it was a problem with select() calls.

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

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

413 nanohertz, by the way.

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.

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

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

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

Feynman recounted another good one upperclassmen would use on freshmen physics students: When you look at words in a mirror, how come they're reversed left to right but not top to bottom? What's special about the horizontal axis?

Commentators agree that this will probably be the last World Cup in which Messi faces serious competition.

During the second semester, the path is briefly routed through the dishwasher.

I call Rule 34 on Wolfram's Rule 34.

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

ERRORS: HAIR JAM. COLOR-SAFE CONDITIONER CARTRIDGE RUNNING LOW. LEGAL-SIZE HAIR TRAY EMPTY, USING LETTER-SIZE HAIR ONLY.

Ground-pole-ball-pole can be fun if you shake the first pole to get the second one whipping around dangerously, but the ball at the joint gets torn apart pretty fast.

Our anti-de Sitter club is small at the moment, but I've started corresponding with the conformal field theory people.

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

I'm an H⁺ denier, in that I refuse to consider loose protons to be real hydrogen, so I personally believe it stands for 'pretend'.

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

Proof of Zermelo's well-ordering theorem given the Axiom of Choice: 1: Take S to be any set. 2: When I reach step three, if S hasn't managed to find a well-ordering relation for itself, I'll feed it into this wood chipper. 3: Hey, look, S is well-ordered.

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

I went to a dinner where there was a full 10 minutes of Holy Grail quotes exchanged, with no context, in lieu of conversation. It depressed me badly.

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.

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

By my count, only 48 of the 158 minutes in Live Free or Die Hard have action. That's pathetic, guys. Crank is better, but needs a bigger budget and more Summer Glau.

There are more Trump voters in California than Texas, more Biden voters in Texas than New York, more Trump voters in New York than Ohio, more Biden voters in Ohio than Massachusetts, more Trump voters in Massachusetts than Mississippi, and more Biden voters in Mississippi than Vermont.

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

"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!"

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

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

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.

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*.

"The Venn diagram of the sun and the moon is a circle." --someone being snarky at totality

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

Oh, because Facebook has worked out SO WELL for everyone.

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

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

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

When Guitar Hero 2 comes out I'll have fresh conversational material for MONTHS.

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

Feels like I picked a bad year to try to start having a healthy relationship with political news.

It's a beautiful day in the neighborhood!

The IAU ban came after the 'redefinition of 'planet' to include the IAU president's mom' incident.

Hourly haircuts would be annoying, but they'd be easier to do yourself, since you'd have adjacent hairs as a guide. Growing it out would be a huge pain, though.

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'.

Our company is agile and lean with a focus on the long tail. Ok, our company is actually a polecat I found in my backyard.

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

As a first step, they can put in a secondary deck, to help drivers try it out and find out how fun the jumps are. After a while no one will use the old flat deck and they can remove it.

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

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

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

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

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.

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).

If you're annoying enough, you can get them to respond with an involuntary second sigh and get a rhythm going.

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

This PSA brought to you by several would-be assassins who tried to wave me in front of speeding cars in the last month and who will have to try harder next time.

The failures usually don't hurt anything, and if it installs several versions, it increases the chance that one of them is right. (Note: The 'yes' command and '2>/dev/null' are recommended additions.)

Science tip: Scientists hardly ever use the two-dot division sign, and when they do it often doesn't even mean division, but they still get REALLY mad when you repurpose it to write stuff like SALE! ALL SHOES 30÷ OFF!

Dear Diary: UNSUBSCRIBE

Listen, I'm not a fan of the Spanish Inquisition OR predatory multi-level marketing schemes...

The projection for those who think the Mercator projection gives people a distorted idea of how big Greenland is, but a very accurate idea of how big it SHOULD be.

I'm so bad at carrying a tune, those 'find a song by humming its melody' websites throw an HTTP 406 error as soon as I start to hum.

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

We could organize a nationwide old-photo-album search, but the real Worst McFly is probably lost to time.

Comes with a 50-lb sack of gender changers, and also an add-on device with a voltage selector and a zillion circular center pin DC adapter tips so you can power any of those devices from the 90s.

Correlation doesn't imply causation, but it does waggle its eyebrows suggestively and gesture furtively while mouthing 'look over there'.

It's not our fault we caught a group on their way home from a geography bee. And they taught us that Uzbekistan is one of the world's two doubly-landlocked countries!

The Lord of the Rings sequel, set years after the Ring hubbub has died down, is just Samwise discreetly creeping back to Bag End to finish dropping the eaves.

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

I'm sure a discussion of the reason for the disappearance of adventure games in favor of RPGs would be fascinating

People looking for the gaps in our understanding where the meaning of consciousness or free will might hide often turn to quantum uncertainty or infinite cosmologies, as if we don't have breathtakingly complex emergent phenomena right there in our freezers.

Films need to do this more, if only to piss off the people who have to feed it into the projector.

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®.

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

To motivate it to fire its harpoons hard enough, Rosetta's Philae lander has been programmed to believe it is trying to kill the comet.

Attention all passengers: This is an express sequence to infinity. If your stop is not a power of two, please disembark now.

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

"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."

There used to be these ads, see . . .

When comparing hypotheses with Bayesian methods, the similar 'clickbayes factor' can account for some harder-to-quantify priors.

Unlike an Iron Age collapse, a Bronze Age collapse releases energy, since copper and tin are past the iron peak on the curve of binding energy.

I have so many plans. It would incorporate a Galton board, a Ranque-Hilsch marble vortex tube, and a compartment lined with pinball bouncers with a camera-and-servo Maxwell's Demon that separated the balls into fast and slow sides.

At my OLD school, we used Microsoft Encarta 2005.

In contrast to Pascal's Wager Triangle, Pascal's Triangle Wager argues that maybe God wants you to draw a triangle of numbers where each one is the sum of the two numbers above it, so you probably should, just in case.

All services are microservices if you ignore most of their features.

Poisson distributions have no value over negative numbers

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

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

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

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

Once again topping the list of tonight's hottest rising stars in Hollywood is ξ Persei!

People keep telling me to use the radio but I really hate making voice calls.

Following this, the pong paddle went on a mission to destroy Atari headquarters and, due to a mixup, found himself inside the game The Matrix Reloaded. Boy, was THAT ever hard to explain to him.

It only works a few times before you have to capsize the boat in a soap lagoon again.

You absolute-fucking-... shit.

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

Honestly feel a little sheepish about the amount of time and effort I spent confirming "yes, the vaccine helps protect people from getting sick and dying" but I guess everyone needs a hobby.

This is almost as bad as the time I signed up for a purely partisan fishing expedition.

The distinctive 'UCLA comma' and 'Michigan comma' are a long string of commas at the start and end of the sentence respectively.

'TMI' he whispered, gazing into the sea.

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

That guy only drives an alkaline car to overcompensate for his highly acidic penis.

"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."

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

Are you the annoying spoon or the sleepy spoon?

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

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

I run a business selling rural internet access. My infrastructure consists of a bunch of Verizon wifi hotspots that I sign up for and then cancel at the end of the 14-day return period.

I don't dig pit traps and cover them with sticks and a thin layer of leaves nearly as much as I expected; I find a chance to do it barely once a month.

Hint: If you ever encounter this puzzle in a crossword app, just [term for someone with a competitive and high-achieving personality].

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

If you want to see the polling questions we agree on MOST, you can check out Chapter 24 of my book How To, where I got the Roper Center on Public Opinion Research to help me design the world's least electable political campaign platform.

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

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

Instead of bobcat, package contained chair.

$We didn't even get to the continued fractions!$

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

Fine, we can go search the Himalayas for the Yeti ONE more time, but keep a safe altitude over the Pacific and PLEASE watch where you're going. We can't afford another Amelia Earhart incident.

New zero-day vulnerability: In addition to rowhammer, it turns out lots of servers are vulnerable to regular hammers, too.

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.

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

Billy Joel briefly detained

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

My goal in life is to be personally responsible for at least one sports rule change.

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

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>.

Why are we spending billions to ruin Mars with swarms of robots when Elon Musk has promised to ruin Mars for a FRACTION of the cost?

Calligraphy exam: Write down the number 37, spelled out, nicely.

The no-communication theorem states that no communication about the no-communication theorem can clear up the misunderstanding quickly enough to allow faster-than-light signaling.

But surely I owe you an accurate answer!

If you're thinking 'Wait, a giant crystal cave in Mexico? What's that?' then I'm SO excited for the image search you're about to do.

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

This happens in geek circles every so often. The 'Hey, this is just a system I can figure out easily!' is also a problem among engineers first diving into the stock market.

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.

ARCTANGENT THETA = ENCHANT AT TARGET

Controls are a little hard to figure out.

If I really focus, I can distinguish between John Steinbeck and John Updike, or between Gore Vidal and Vidal Sassoon, but not both at once.

'Oh no, the box is drifting out into the harbor!' 'Yeah, I wouldn't worry about losing it.'

But I've made $13.72 already today! Ow, stop throwing pennies.

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

If I click 'no', I've probably given up on everything, so don't bother taking me to the page I was trying to go to. Just drop me on the homepage. Thanks.

GO FOR LUNCH, REPEAT, GO FOR LUNCH.

We're building on our earlier success getting web developers to pay to change the backslashes in our displayed payment URL to forward slashes.

Note: How To will teach you lots of cool stuff about technology, data storage, butterfly migration, and more. Also you will never see your files again.

When I was a kid, someone told me the end of The Giver was ambiguous, which surprised me. I had just assumed Jonah died--because the book had a medal on the cover, and I knew grown-ups liked stories where sad stuff happens at the end for no reason.

ALERT: Some pending mandatory software updates require version 21.1.2 of the Oracle/Sun Java(tm) JDK(tm) Update Manager Runtime Environment Meta-Updater, which is not available for your platform.

2040s: RNA formed the basis for life each of the five known times it arose on the early Earth.

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

Every age: "I'm glad I'm not the clueless person I was five years ago, but now I don't want to get any older."

Wikipedia path: Virus -> Immune system -> Innate immune system -> Parasites -> List of parasites of humans -> Naegleria fowleri -> Primary amoebic meningoencephalitis -> Deciding I DEFINITELY shouldn't connect an aquarium pump to my sinuses

'We can also use middle names in place of first pet's names, but yours is something incomprehensible about dropping tables.'

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

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.

He says this is the year of Linux on the desktop! The world of Windows will fade any moment now!

It's not hard when you have the same thought like 40 or 50 percent of the time.

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

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.

'We're shocked by the Notre Dame fire. Click for our tribute to--' [okay] 'Now that we're all staying at home these past few weeks thanks to this new coronavirus, we--' [okay]

You can either hang out in the Android Loop or the HURD loop.

When we started distributing special status tokens that signify which people are important enough to join an elite group, we never could have imagined we might be creating some problems down the line.

A tribute to Buttercup Festival

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

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

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

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.

An hour later: SUGGESTION: LICK HER NIPPLE MORE.

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

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!

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

We find you guilty of closing your torrents as soon as they finish. Your sentence is unremovable Hungarian subtitles on everything.

There's planned downtime every night when we turn on the Roomba and it runs over the cord.

I love Brussels Sprouts Mandela Effect; I saw them open for Correct Horse Battery Staple.

On the plus side, she wrote 'Welcome to the AAA Club!' in lipstick on the bathroom mirror, and left me a membership/roadside assistance card on the counter.

But the rind is where all the vitamins are!

1916: 'PHYSICIST DAD' TURNS HIS ATTENTION TO GRAVITY, AND YOU WON'T BELIEVE WHAT HE FINDS. [PICS] [NSFW]

I'm sure they're a harmful tool of the cosmetics-industrial complex and all, but my goodness do those strips ever work to pull gunk out of your pores. I was shocked, disgusted, and vaguely fascinated by the result.

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

"I know it seems impossible, but the trick is that I sailed in here when I was very young."

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

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

(It's the TMBG Dial-a-Song line, to save you some time.)

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

"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."

Facebook, Apple, and Google all got away with their monopolist power grabs because they don't have any 'S's in their names for critics to snarkily replace with '$'s.

Fuck it. I'm just going to Waffle House.

This was my friend David's idea

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.

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

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

I like trying to make it as hard as possible. "I'd love to meet up, maybe in a few days? Next week is looking pretty empty. *witchcraft"

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.

Some surfaces may seem difficult to glue. But if you research the materials, find tables of what adhesives work on them, and prepare your surfaces carefully, you can fail to glue them in a fun NEW way that fills your house with dangerous vapors.

You can also just ignore any science assertion where 'quantum mechanics' is the most complicated phrase in it.

Technically now it's a 34-foot zone.

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

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.'

There's one person in Missouri who says "carbo bev" who the entire rest of the country HATES.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

The robot is pregnant. It isn't mine.

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

I can't get any work done because my friend Catherine is sitting on my keyboard.

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

Oh no, a musician just burst in through the door confidently twirling a treble clef.

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

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

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.

Even the identity matrix doesn't work normally

Oh, yeah, we get tons of them at these casual sex bars.

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.

Small devices use two-prong USB-AC, but there's also a three-prong version with a USB-B plug as the ground.

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

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.

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

The problem with perspective is that it's bidirectional.

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

Maybe you should wear one too? I guess I'm taller than you, so as long as I have one we're fine.

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

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.

Mark Zuckerberg has only neutral feelings toward Peppa Pig, who he understands is a fictional character, and he blames the coronavirus pandemic on other factors.

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

Oh, definitely not; they don't have Amazon Prime.

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

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

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

I sympathize with the TPP protagonist because I, too, have progressed through a surprising number of stages of life despite spending entire days stuck against simple obstacles.

It's the NORMAL distribution, not the TANGENT distribution.

Using a reflective wall in a game to give one shot two chances to hit is called a double-tapetum lucidum.

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

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

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

Roundly-condemned headlinese initiative shuttered indefinitely.

These are all sans-serif compounds. Serif compounds are dramatically different and usually much more reactive.

The Python environmental protection agency wants to seal it in a cement chamber, with pictorial messages to future civilizations warning them about the danger of using sudo to install random Python packages.

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

The G1, especially with the new Android upgrade, is way better than I originally thought.

It's okay, we can just feed the one-pixel image into an AI upscaler and recover the original image, or at least one that's just as cool.

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

It's time to draw the line.

It means shuffling quickly past nuns on the street with ketchup in your palms, pretending you're hiding stigmata.

Bonus question: Where is London located? (a) The British Isles (b) Great Britain and Northern Ireland (c) The UK (d) Europe (or 'the EU') (e) Greater London

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

Although regardless of how everything else shakes out, I definitely won't mind if the norm "wear a mask if you're feeling sick" sticks around after this.

I looked at some of the data dumps from vulnerable sites, and it was ... bad. I saw emails, passwords, password hints. SSL keys and session cookies. Important servers brimming with visitor IPs. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion, c-beams glittering in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. I should probably patch OpenSSL.

All we have are these stupid tantalizing zircons and the scars on the face of the Moon.

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

Under three ounces, but it stains panties.

This is even better than my previous smartphone casemod: an old Western Electric Model 2500 desk phone handset complete with a frayed, torn-off cord dangling from it.

Also, I hear the 4th root of (9^2 + 19^2/22) is pi.

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

It's much better than the other one.

She won the first half of all our chemo Scrabble games, but then her IV drugs started kicking in and I *dominated*.

Family going to bed at 10 PM is so much worse than jet lag.

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

Also possibly several miles beyond that.

When I say we should do something sometime, I'm secretly hoping you'll say 'Why not now?'

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

Of course, factions immediately sprang up in favor of '~*~sTaR tReK iNtO dArKnEsS~*~', 'xX_StAr TrEk InTo DaRkNess_Xx', and 'Star Trek lnto Darkness' (that's a lowercase 'L').

Oh, what a pity, can't you understand . . .

In my reboot, Dennis the Menace was just trying to send Mr. Wilson a nice comet, but accidentally wiped out his dinosaur garden.

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

Juno mission data suggests that Jupiter actually contains Matryoshka doll-style nested copies of every other planet in the Solar System.

Squinting at a graph is fine for getting a rough idea of the answer, but if you want to pretend to know it exactly, you need statistics.

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

I hope no automatic doors I know read this. I would be so embarrassed.

The bottom ones are also potentially bad news for any other planets in our solar system that have been counting on Earth having a stable orbit.

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

Man, this emo shit was supposed to be for people who didn't have hats.

Not to be confused with 'making money selling this stuff to OTHER people who think it works', which corporate accountants and actuaries have zero problems with.

And I was really impressed with how they managed to shock the Goatse guy.

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

Update: The physics department has recruited an astronomer who studies meteor fireballs.

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

Computer viruses currently fall somewhere between prions and fire.

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

They work even better if you take them with our experimental placebo booster, which I keep in the same bottle.

If you call my regular number, it just goes to my pager.

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

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

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

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

Unless the next line is, "After we broke up, she blamed the painting and spent years planning her revenge, so my sorrow is mixed with relief that the dogs at least denied her that triumph."

The key to discovering life on Mars is to find someone who built a camera and landed it on Mars. Then you just look through the pictures for plants and dogs and stuff.

Hey, what are the odds -- five Ayn Rand fans on the same train! Must be going to a convention.

Don't we all.

It's believed that Golgi was originally an independent organism who was eventually absorbed into our cells, where he began work on his Apparatus.

Check it out; I've had sex with someone who's had sex with someone who's written a paper with Paul Erdős!

If you don't know where you are on Earth, the angle of satellite dishes can help constrain your latitude. If some of them are pointing straight up, you're probably near the Equator, right under the ring.

Aww, the oceanic crust and the continental crust are getting married!

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

Inigo/Buttercup 4eva <3

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

MY RESULTS ARE A SIGNIFICANT IMPROVEMENT ON THE STATE OF THE AAAAAAAAAAAART

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

We can do this.

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

Things were better before the Structuring and the Levels.

It was the funniest 6.5 seconds of my life, although as usual like 80% of it was just Tom and Ray's gasping, hacking laughter.

The younger folk in the audience think this is a joke.

My country's World Cup win was exciting and all, but c'mon, what if the players wore nylon wings and COULD LITERALLY FLY?

When you worry that you're missing out on something by not making both choices simultaneously by quantum superposition, that's called phomo.

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

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

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.

I'm the proud parent of an honor student, and the person driving me is proud, too!

"The only link we've found between the two documents is that a fragment of the Noah one mentions Aaron's brother Moses parting an ocean. Is that right?" "... yes. Yes, exactly."

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.

Thanks for bringing us along.

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

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

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

Unfortunately for her, real Star Wars fans are attracted to a gal with a good force choke.

"Ok, I lit the smoke bomb and rolled it under the bed. Let's see if it--" ::FWOOOSH:: "Politifact says: PANTS ON FIRE!"

They have a telescope pointed RIGHT AT US!

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

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!

Star Trek V is a small part of the space frontier, but it's been a while since that movie came out so I assume we've finished exploring it by now.

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.'

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

autoexec code posted by verified twitter users

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

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.

Listen, you need to get over your reluctance to permanently alter a game. Now roll 2d6 to determine how many ounces of soda to spill into the box.

Hey! No running in the back-arc basin!

[20 minutes later] ", hi."

Once the air from the top passes below the plane of the wing and catches sight of the spooky skulls, it panics, which is the cause of turbulent vortices.

1937-2020

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.

Type II Kardashev civilizations eventually completely enclose their planetary system in a Dyson sphere because space is way too big to look at all the time.

'Look to my coming on the fifth day. At dawn, look to the east.' 'And look to the west to see our shadows!'

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

Screw these 36-degree angles. I'm converting to Judaism.

SUGGESTIONS FOR FUTURE RESEARCH: No further research is needed as it is frankly none of our business.

Constantly stopping these briefings halfway through is becoming a pain.

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

Well, for some value of 'actually work'.

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

I average out the spring and fall changes and just set my clocks 39 minutes ahead year-round.

We all remember those famous first words spoken by an astronaut on the surface of Mars: "That's one small step fo- HOLY SHIT LOOK OUT IT'S GOT SOME KIND OF DRILL! Get back to the ... [unintelligible] ... [signal lost]"

If you see two numbers but they're both the same and you have to squint to read them, you have synesthesia, colorblindness, diplopia, and myopia.

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

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

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

The worst part is when sidewalk cracks are out-of-sync with your natural stride.

Add main-belt asteroids to taste.

The key caps use LCD displays for all the vowels, so they can automatically adjust over the years to reflect ongoing vowel shifts while allowing you to keep typing phonetically.

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

Extremely rude how Turing's later formulations of the halting problem called me out by name specifically.

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.

Cue angry letters from all seven fans of Xenocide.

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

My all-time favorite example of syntactic ambiguity comes from Wikipedia: 'Charlotte's Web is a children's novel by American author E. B. White, about a pig named Wilbur who is saved from being slaughtered by an intelligent spider named Charlotte.'

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

I've never been that big of a hug person, but it turns out I'm not quite this small of a hug person either.

Uh-oh.

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

Thanks to the ForcedEntry exploit, your company's entire tech stack can now be hosted out of a PDF you texted to someone.

It's like I've always said--people just need more common sense. But not the kind of common sense that lets them figure out that they're being condescended to by someone who thinks they're stupid, because then I'll be in trouble.

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

NASCAR removed the passenger seats because drivers hated how astronauts kept riding along with them and loudly announcing "Ahh, what a nice and relaxing drive."

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

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

*refresh* Aww, still in Kalamazoo. *refresh* Aww, still in Kalamazoo.

"I actually came in in the middle so I don't know which topic we're briefing on; the same slides work for like half of them."

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

Kind of rude of them to simultaneously issue an EVACUATION - IMMEDIATE alert, a SHELTER IN PLACE alert, and a 911 TELEPHONE OUTAGE alert.

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

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

'Come to what?' 'You. Me. This moment.'

[Below] On this site on May 12th, 2023, I finally learned how to use the masonry bit for my drill.

[proudly greeting the hotel manager at the door] "Did I do a good job?"

"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.'"