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

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The weird sense of duty really good sysadmins have can border on the sociopathic, but it's nice to know that it stands between the forces of darkness and your cat blog's servers.

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

What do you want me to do? LEAVE? Then they'll keep being wrong!

When you Google an error message and it gets no results, you can be pretty sure you've found a clue to the location of Martin's sword.

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

SELECT * FROM GHOSTS

Disgusting

Some personal news: After treating my first case a few years ago with antibiotics, I can report that I have now had appendicitis for the second and--unless something extremely unexpected happened with the surgery--final time.

If you hold the meteor too long, it may imprint on you and form a contact binary, making reintroduction to space difficult.

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.

I would subscribe to a Twitter feed that supplied you with one reasonable sports opinion per day, like 'The Red Sox can't make the playoffs (championship games), but in last night's game their win seriously damaged the chances of the Yankees (longstanding rival team).'

'Broom first, then slippers.' 'How do I know you'll return the broom once you've secured your ticket?' 'I'll leave my little dog as collateral.' 'Great. Pleasure doing business!'

[Google search] how do I block my lawn

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

If you close an account while it's still friends with people, it contributes to database linkage accumulation slowdown, which is a major looming problem for web infrastructure and definitely not a thing I just made up.

... go go gadget video camera. Go go gadget cup.

I have accidentally watered virtually every person and object in Pelican Town.

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

NOW INVENT AN IMPOSSIBLE-TO-TRANSLATE LANGUAGE AND USE IT TO TELL US WHERE THE MONEY IS.

It's a beautiful day in the neighborhood!

Water is thinner than both, and fire is *definitely* thicker.

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

CLIMAX is good, but SEXCLIMAX is even better.

It's a real accomplishment to mess up a ravioli recipe badly enough that the resulting incident touches all four quadrants of the NFPA hazard diamond.

The ten-year cancerversary is traditionally the Cursed Artifact Granting Immortality anniversary.

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

There's also a unicode-handling bug in the URL request library, and we're storing the passwords unsalted ... so if we salt them with emoji, we can close three issues at once!

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

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

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

FOR AN INTRIGUING TIME CALL

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.)

On the other hand, physicists like to say physics is to math as sex is to masturbation.

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

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

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

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

Washable, though only once.

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

Another group of mathematicians is working to put an upper bound on the number, although everyone keeps begging them to stop.

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

I call Rule 34 on The Secret House.

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

Hello and welcome to Millibar Millibarn Attometer, an advice show for the Planck era.

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

If you don't have an extension cord I can get that too. Because we're friends! Right?

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

[title-text similarly alphabetized]

We have met the enemy and he is us.

It was their main recruiting poster, hung nearly ten feet up a wall! This means the hackers have LADDER technology! Are we headed for a future where everyone has to pay $50 for one of those locked plexiglass poster covers? More after the break ...

Hm, this burger place has a couple of good reviews, but LakeSlayer7 says he got food poisoning there and everyone should try this other place down by the lake instead.

In the future, a group of resistance fighters send me back in time with instructions to find the Skynet prototype and try to upgrade it.

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.

A big obstacle in experimenting with the mind's dream-simulation-engine is holding onto the details as you wake up. With TCMP you can bring back any information you want.

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

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

'I see you're in this mood again.' 'I am always in this mood.'

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

The wolves thin the RAID arrays, removing the slowest and weakest disks to keep the average seek speed high.

Trust me, you don't want to get on the wrong side of the paramilitary enforcement arm of the International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service.

Or so I hope?

The Strong Collatz Conjecture states that this holds for any set of obsessively-hand-applied rules.

Be careful—it's breeding season, and some of these can be *extremely* defensive of their nests.

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

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

And the ten minutes striking up a conversation with that strange kid in homeroom sometimes matters more than every other part of high school combined.

My trash can broke recently and I had to get rid of it. When I picked it up, I suffered a brief but harrowing existential crisis.

It has so many advantages--it preserves Martian life, requires fewer interplanetary launches, and makes it much easier to field-test Mars rovers.

colors.rgb("blue") yields "#0000FF". colors.rgb("yellowish blue") yields NaN. colors.sort() yields "rainbow"

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

I've always wondered whether you could drink slowly enough, and eliminate fast enough, that you just sort of peed continuously. But I'm afraid to try because I worry someone might call while I'm doing it and ask what I'm up to, and I won't be able to think of a lie.

'Smilodon fatalis' narrowly edged out 'Tyrannosaurus rex' to win this year's Most Badass Latin Names competition, after edging out 'Dracorex hogwartsia' and 'Stygimoloch spinifer' (meaning 'horned dragon from the river of death') in the semifinals.

It's like the squirt bottle we use with the cat.

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

I recently learned something that solved a mystery that had bugged me since childhood--why, when I looked at an analog clock, the hand would sometimes seem to take a couple seconds to start ticking. Google "stopped clock illusion".

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.

Though they do appreciate how much he improved the heating system for the flame pit.

A mix of the two is even worse: 'Thanks for unsubscribing and helping us pare this list down to reliable supporters.'

The 538TR attempts to capture a player's combined skill at basketball (either real-life or NBA 2K18) and election forecasting.

I never understood why someone would expect me to accept their rules right after they'd punched me. I'm sure it's all very symbolic or something.

FYI: I'll be releasing a wolf into a randomly-chosen front yard sometime in the next 30 years. Now your fear is reasonable, and you don't need to feel embarrassed anymore. Problem solved!

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.

If that doesn't fix it, git.txt contains the phone number of a friend of mine who understands git. Just wait through a few minutes of 'It's really pretty simple, just think of branches as...' and eventually you'll learn the commands that will fix everything.

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

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.

[After setting your car on fire] Listen, your car's temperature has changed before.

I have a bunch of things open right now.

Mile High Club membership [✓] [ ] Discovery of parts of Amelia Earhart's skeleton [ ] [ ] Mid-flight incident that results in safe landing on the Hudson River [✓] [ ]

At least people who make religious predictions of the apocalypse have an answer to the question 'Why didn't you predict any of the other ones that happened recently?'

Every place has a local cryptid; more places need a local Pictish Beast, a creature in historical art that's drawn so weirdly that no one can tell what animal it's supposed to be.

'I'm here to return what Prometheus stole.' would be a good thing to say if you were a fighter pilot in a Michael Bay movie where for some reason the world's militaries had to team up to defeat every god from human mythology, and you'd just broken through the perimeter and gotten a missile lock on Mount Olympus.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.'

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

It maintains odor levels in a normal familiar range, so if you open the windows and the air gets too fresh, it filters it through some dirty laundry samples to compensate.

I'm really worried Christopher Nolan will kill a man dressed like a bat in his next movie. (The man will be dressed like a bat, I mean. Christopher Nolan won't be, probably.)

Poisson distributions have no value over negative numbers

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

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

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.

Sorry, I've just always had these random things I don't like--like olives, or robots drilling holes in me without warning.

If nothing else, that reasoning definitely overturns syllogisms.

At least there's a general understanding all around that Doctor Who is its own thing.

Guest comic by Bill Amend of FoxTrot, an inspiration to all us nerdy-physics-majors-turned-cartoonists, of which there are an oddly large number.

You could at least not wear the lab coat everywhere, dude.

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

Hey, are you friends with any hamsters? This kite needs a passenger.

The less common, even worse outcome: "3: [everyone in the financial system] WOW, where did all my money just go?"

The 6 Weirdest Objects The Buzzfeed Writers Are Throwing Out Their Windows At Us

You absolute-fucking-... shit.

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.

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

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

It's true, I think about this all the time.

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

Time to paint another grammarian silhouette on the side of the desktop.

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

I can't wait until I'm fully vaccinated and can safely send chat messages in all caps again.

If this were SMBC, the alt-text drawing thingy would be a giraffe hooker fluttering her eyelashes.

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

It's frustrating to calibrate your precautions when there's only one kind of really definitive feedback you can get, you can only get it once, and when you do it's too late.

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.

"One popular strategy is to enter an emotional spiral. Could that be the right approach? We contacted several researchers who are experts in emotional spirals to ask them, but none of them were in a state to speak with us."

On Mondays I go running, so you'll have to get up early and follow along on a parallel street. What fun!

You'd think it'd be easy to just bet money against these people, but you have to consider the probability of them paying up.

I know having so many base pairs makes rebasing complicated, but you're in Bilateria, so shouldn't you at LEAST be better at using git head?

Mathematicians give a third answer on the vertical axis, "That question is poorly defined, but we have a sub-field devoted to every plausible version of it."

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

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

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

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.

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.

Texting should work. Unless the message is too long, in which case it gets converted to voicemails, and I think I'm locked out of my voicemail.

Opening dialogue by Scott

We've also developed the semi-semi-log scale, where the Y-axis for the left half of the graph is a log scale but on the right half it isn't.

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

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

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

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.

Because they orbit the Earth every 90 minutes, some astronauts should try to argue that, due to CDC regulations and time zone technicalities, they should be able to get their second dose just 30 or 40 hours after their first.

"Crowdsourced steering" doesn't sound quite as appealing as "self driving."

A tribute to Buttercup Festival

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!

Lambda calculus? More like SHAMbda calculus, amirite?

The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine or Home Improvement or DIY

At least they're not alone down there.

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

If I'm such a god, why isn't Maru *my* cat?

Colorado is working to develop coherent amber waves, which would allow them to finally destroy Kansas and Nebraska with a devastating but majestic grain laser.

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.

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

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

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

And no avian society ever develops space travel because it's impossible to focus on calculus when you could be outside flying.

I was going to record an album with that cover under the name "PINK FTFY", so it'd come after them on the store CD rack. But at this point music stores are just rooms where CDs are set out to age before they're thrown away, so probably nobody would see it.

Since the current Twitter threadfall kicked off in early 2016, we can expect it to continue until the mid 2060s when the next Interval begins.

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

It was finally destroyed with a nuclear weapon carrying the destructive energy of the Hiroshima bomb.

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.

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

I told her I'd take her address off the packaging if she'd stop submitting anonymous food safety complaints about my bakery to the health department, but she sent me a note that said NO DEAL along with an extra large batch of cookies.

And a different ghost has replaced me in the bedroom.

I think you could get up to about 11:59:57 before you'd have trouble swallowing the chocolates fast enough. At that point, you'd need some kind of a liquify-and-chug apparatus to get up over the 11:59:59 barrier. Anyway, Merry Christmas!

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

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

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

Starring Macaulay Culkin.

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.

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.

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

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

And thus was smallpox introduced into the previously Undying Lands.

I just spent 20 minutes deciding whether to start an email with 'Hi' or 'Hey', so I think it transferred correctly.

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

'Drama' is just 'people being upset', when someone says they're always surrounded by drama and they just ignore it, it starts to make sense that their strategy might be backfiring.

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

'Whoa, twenty-two in two hours!' 'Your site got twenty-two hundred hits in two hours?' 'No. Twenty-two. But still, that's like half the people on the internet!'

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

My competitors say the tiny single tiny caster is unsafe, unstable, and offers no advantages over traditional designs, to which I say: wow, why are you guys so mean? I thought we were friends!

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

It hurts to be hit there, you know

I'm working to bring about a superintelligent AI that will eternally torment everyone who failed to make fun of the Roko's Basilisk people.

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

Their calculations show it will 'pass within the distance of the moon' but that it 'will not hit the moon, so what's the point?'

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.

<A>: Like </a>this.

'The sad thing is that I just wanted to talk about your poor smoke-bomb techniques.'

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.

This is silly, of course. The enemy will be born in the network.

It's taken me 20 years to get over skyline tetris.

With the right 90-degree rotation, any effect is a side effect.

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

It's time to draw the line.

A tattoo of a tattoo parlor receipt

I'd like 0.4608 apples, please.

It's possible. Better to be on the safe side.

The worst part is that's the millisigma interval.

'TMI' he whispered, gazing into the sea.

I searched my .bash_history for the line with the highest ratio of special characters to regular alphanumeric characters, and the winner was: cat out.txt | grep -o "[[(].*[])][^)]]*$" ... I have no memory of this and no idea what I was trying to do, but I sure hope it worked.

Positive vibes/longitudes only

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

I hear my brother Ricky won his school's egg drop by leaving the egg inside the hen.

The tumbleweed then tried to roll off into the sunset, but due to the Old West's placement north of the subtropical ridge, the prevailing winds were in the wrong direction.

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.

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

One of the things of bear spray says that, and I'm not one to disobey safety instructions, but there are no bears around here. Guess it's time for a camping trip where we leave lots of food out!

They tried to report me to the authorities, but because I had the device they couldn't charge me.

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

If anyone calls you on any weird detail, just say it's from the Jedi Prince book series, which contains so much random incongruous stuff that even most Expanded Universe/Legends fans collectively agreed to forget about it decades ago.

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

The Atlantic is expanding at about 10 ppm (points per month).

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

Deep in some corner of my heart, I suspect that real times tables are wrong about 6x7=42 and 8x7=56.

I have never been as self-conscious about my handwriting as when I was inking in the caption for this comic.

The robot is pregnant. It isn't mine.

We also should really have checked that the old water tower was disconnected from the water system before we started filling it with compressed air.

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

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

I'm going to tell the manufacturer that their business practices are ADMIRABLE and ETHICAL and their developers are ATTRACTIVE and I'm going to report them to the FCC for their IMPECCABLE VIRTUE.

With just one extra line, he could have anticipated the 2003 film The Core, but some things are too audacious for even the greatest visionaries.

"...just got back and didn't see your message until just now. Sorry! -- TIME THIS MESSAGE SAT HALF-FINISHED IN DRAFTS FOLDER: 3 days, 2 hours, 45 minutes."

In competition, you can only play a name if you know who the person is. No fair saying "Frank ... Johnson. That sounds like a real person! Let me just Google him real quick."

When Vera Menchik entered a 1929 tournament, a male competitor mocked her by suggesting that a special 'Vera Menchik Club' would be created for any player who lost to her. When the tournament began, he promptly became the first member of said club, and over the years it accumulated a large and illustrious roster.

That cat has some serious periodic components

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

The rare compound solar-lunar-nephelogical eclipse

'It has a ghost in it. Take it back.' 'No.'

Does it get taller first and then widen, or does it reach full width before getting taller, or alternate, or what?

I wonder what 2008 meme will go bizarrely mainstream in 2009 like Rickrolling did 2007-2008. I Accidentally <noun>? Yo dawg? Place your bets now!

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

If you reach 122, you get complete unrevertible editorial control over Jeanne Calment's Wikipedia article.

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

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

That's my hat! You took my hat!

If the first audio they downlink is from the descent, we probably won't be able to hear anything over the sound of the rover screaming.

m-x machineofdeath-mode

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.

It's science!

Phylogeneticists are working on identifying and notifying its next of kin.

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

[holding up a three-phase motor] As you can see here, the problem is that the humidifier I took this from is broken.

The bunch of disadvantaged kids I was tutoring became too good at writing, and their essays were forcing me to confront painful existential questions, so I started trying to turn them on to drugs and crime instead.

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.

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

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

I don't understand why people are so disingenuous! I just want someone to walk with!

Strictly speaking, 'violin' refers to the internal structure of the data. The external portion visible in the plot is called the 'viola.'

Eärendil will patrol the walls of night only until the sun reaches red giant stage, engulfing the Morning Star on his brow. Light and high beauty are passing things as well.

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

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

The interactive experience is built on a single theological framework that unites Dante, George R. R. Martin, every major heist movie, and Erin Gloria Ryan's "Kevin is dead" Home Alone theory.

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

If you shrank the Solar System to the size of Texas, the Houston metro area would be smaller than a grasshopper in Dallas.

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

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

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

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'.

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

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.

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

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

Planets are turning out to be so common that to show all the planets in our galaxy, this chart would have to be nested in itself--with each planet replaced by a copy of the chart--at least three levels deep.

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

They actually showed up on the first scan by the first WiFi-capable device.

Grayton also proposed making college scholarships available exclusively to sexually active teens, amnesty for illegal immigrants who create room for themselves by killing a citizen, and a graduated income tax based on penis size. He has been endorsed by Tracy Morgan, John Wilkes Booth's ghost, and the Time Cube guy.

In general you should only include your single best data point in the paper. The rest of the data can go in the supplementary materials.

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

And the journal is filled with all the things I'd say to her if I were nice like you. I burn it when it's full.

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

It's cool how, when there's a number lots of people are curious about, but which isn't easy to measure, some random guess will get cited everywhere and become the universally quoted value. Unrelatedly, did you know there are 850 trillion waves in the ocean?

Try our bottomless drinks and fall forever!

That seems like an awful lot of hassle when all I wanted was a cool sword.

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

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

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

I vaguely and irrationally resent how useful WebPlotDigitizer is.

It IS about physics. It ALL is.

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

I was thinking of observing stars to verify Einstein's theory of relativity again, but I gotta say, that thing is looking pretty solid at this point.

"We TOLD you it was hard." "Yeah, but now that I'VE tried, we KNOW it's hard."

We once got grounded when we convinced the FAA to block flights through our county because of ash clouds.

I'm not sure if you can get Epcot, but my friend just got LegoLand. He guessed California but it was the one in Denmark. Meanwhile, I'm rapidly becoming a connoisseur of unmarked dirt roads over flat, barren landscapes.

The warning diamond on the Materials Safety Data Sheet for this stuff just has the "😰" emoji in all four fields.

SOUND DOGS MAKE: [BARKING] [HISSING] [LIGHTSABER NOISES] [FLUENT ENGLISH] [SWEARING]

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

This restaurant is great! I was feeling really sick, but then I ate there and felt better!

The only blood these contracts are signed in is from me cutting my hand trying to open the goddamn CD case.

No matter how fast I swing, I can never travel outside this loop! Maybe space outside it doesn't exist! But I bet it does. This tire came from somewhere.

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

If you ever want to get beaten up by a bunch of graphic designers, try removing the serifs from Times New Roman and adding them to Comic Sans.

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

Once you've done this, make a note of how old they were. Then, when their age reaches double that, show them this chart again.

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

This image stays roughly in sync with the day (assuming the Earth continues spinning). Shortcut: xkcd.com/now

Shoot, it landed in the golf course. Gonna be hard to get it down the--oh, never mind, it rolled onto the ice hazard. Face-off!

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.

Did he just go crazy and jump out the window?

Under quantum tax law, photons sent through a beamsplitter don't actually choose which path they took, or incur a tax burden, until their wavefunction collapses when the power is sold.

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

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

When Galileo dropped two weights from the Leaning Tower of Pisa, they put him in the history books. But when I do it, I get 'detained by security' for 'injuring several tourists.'

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

Changes with this update: If you use the combined scan-shred function, it now performs them in that order instead of the reverse, saving a HUGE amount of CPU time.

I love their cover of 1,200 Balloons, Dalmatians, and Miles.

Most people don't realize it, but they actually launch a new space station every few weeks because this keeps happening.

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

I've been working on chocolate bar annealing techniques to try to produce the perfect laser s'more. Maybe don't mention that on the grant application though.

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

I don't get it. The peak acceleration for passengers was WAY lower than in the giant-waterslide-loop-the-loop incident the other cruise line fired me for.

Maybe you should keep FEWER backups; it sounds like throwing away everything you've done and starting from scratch might not be the worst idea.

If things are too quiet, try asking a couple of friends whether "a couple" should always mean "two". As with the question of how many spaces should go after a period, it can turn acrimonious surprisingly fast unless all three of them agree.

Really, the only honest 24-hour stores are the ones in places like Arizona and Hawaii, and many of them are still wrong in certain years.

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

His date works for Red Hat, who hired a coach for her, too. He advised her to 'rent lots of movies like Hitch. Guys love those.'

The Taylor series should have been canceled after the first term.

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

I tell my children 'it's not whether you win or lose, it's how you play the game.' I'm trying to take the edge off their competitive drive to ensure that I can always beat them.

Kenneth Arrow hated me because the ordering of my preferences changes based on which voting systems have what level of support. But it tells me a lot about the people I'm going to be voting with!

Remember not to take it easy. Put a hot washcloth on your forehead, remain standing, and breathe dry air while taking lots of histamines. You need to give your body a chance to get sick again.

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

I always wanted to impress them with how well I could hear, didn't you? Also, this sets the record for number of awkward-pause panels in one strip (previously held by Achewood)

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

And I even got out my adorable new netbook!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Key West, Virginia is not to be confused with Key, West Virginia.

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

The heroes seem to be gaining the upper hand until Darth Juul manages to flip the switch on the car wash control panel from 'REGULAR' to 'PREMIUM.'

The git vehicle fleet eventually pivoted to selling ice cream, but some holdovers remain. If you flag down an ice cream truck and hand the driver a floppy disk, a few hours later you'll get an invite to a git repo.

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.

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.

Coconuts are so far down to the left they couldn't be fit on the chart. Ever spent half an hour trying to open a coconut with a rock? Fuck coconuts.

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

[20 minutes later] ", hi."

"I've noticed you physics people can be a little on the reductionist side." "That's ridiculous. Name ONE reductionist word I've ever said."

They're standing at the lip of the canyon, which isn't clear at all.

Police reported three dozen cheerful bystanders, yet no one claims to have seen who did it.

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

For scientists, this can be the hardest thing about dreams.

Another thing that is a bad problem is if you're flying toward space and the parts start to fall off your space car in the wrong order. If that happens, it means you won't go to space today, or maybe ever.

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

Speed limit c arcminutes^2 per steradian

And the worst part is you won't apologize.

The likely shape of the bells was determined through consultation with several bellringing experts at the Tower of London. Transcripts of those interviews are available in Appendix VII.

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

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.

If you walk out that door you'll be crossing the Rubicon with me, and that's one stream I'm not ready to cross.

In order to carry the necessary crafting supplies, they built the ships at 12:1 scale.

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

Implausible, did you say? Sorry, couldn't quite hear you from all the way up heeeeeeeeere!

'It seems like it's still alive, Professor.' 'Yeah, a big one like this can keep running around for a few billion years after you remove the head."

For someone who has ostensibly outgrown staying up late waiting for Santa, I do spend an awful lot of time refreshing websites to see if packages are here yet.

If it were a two or above I wouldn't be able to answer because it would mean a pause in the screaming.

'DISPATCHING DRONE TO TARGET COORDINATES.' 'Wait, crap, wrong button. Oh jeez.'

Some people suspect that it started as a "No, I didn't forget Valentine's Day" excuse that got out of hand.

I have this weird thing where if I don't drink enough water, I start feeling bad and then die of dehydration.

Sure, taking a few seconds to be respectful toward someone about something they care about doesn't sound hard. But if you talk to hundreds of people every day and they all start expecting that same consideration, it could potentially add up to MINUTES wasted. And for WHAT?

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.

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

The astro-ph.SR arXiv servers are simultaneously being overwhelmed by electronic requests and actual electricity.

Tomorrow's sessions will be entirely devoted to sewing machine rotary hooks.

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

Please do not try any of this and die or get arrested.

Wait, this is space -- how are you talking to me? And, as an afterthought, what's up with the hole in reality?

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

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.

You might think most people you know are reliable voters, or that your nudge won't convince them, and you will usually be right. But some small but significant percentage of the time, you'll be wrong, and that's why this works.

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.

'Don't worry, I can do it in under a minute.' 'Yes, I've noticed.'

We need some grub to munch--I'll go slouch over to the kitchen.

Real programmers set the universal constants at the start such that the universe evolves to contain the disk with the data they want.

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

It's okay, they can figure out which control positions produce scalding water via a trial-and-error feedback loop with a barely-perceptible 10-second lag.

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

Yes, I understand that the turn is half a mile past the big field, but my GPS knows that, too. This would be easier if you weren't about to ask me to repeat it all back to you.

A video can have a log scale that's misaligned with both the time AND space axes.

Learning arcane bullshit from the 80s can break your computer, but if you're willing to wade through arcane bullshit from programmers in the 90s and 2000s, you can break everyone else's computers, too.

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

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.

Some of the KBCU ancillary works try a little too hard to tie everything together. Doris Kearns Goodwin, the sports journalist featured in "Baseball," was somehow ALSO a famous historian who wrote bestselling biographies of Lincoln AND Johnson? Unrealistic.

The Wirecutter staff called the Herman Miller Siege Perilous "the most cursed product we've ever had to fight" and "nearly as immortal as it boasts."

This was always going to be a controversial Wirecutter post, but what really got them in trouble were their 'budget' and 'upgrade' picks.

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

We can do this.

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

Hopefully in a couple of weeks we'll be able to resume our apple-focused updates, because we have SO MUCH to say about Cosmic Crisp.

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?

This projection distorts both area and direction, but preserves Melbourne.

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