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

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Geometry textbooks always try to trick you by adding decorative stripes and dotted lines.

These signals seem to be pre-star-formation but post-Malone.

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

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

Verbiage. Va-jay-jay. Irregardless.

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

"Or maybe, because we're suddenly having so many conversations through written text, we'll start relying MORE on altered spelling to indicate meaning!" "Wat."

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

At the time of this writing, Wikipedia has a wonderful article titled 'List of problems solved by Macgyver'.

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

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

This hostname is going in dozens of remote config files. Changing a kid's name is comparatively easy!

Her daughter is named Help I'm trapped in a driver's license factory.

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

"This one is perfect in every way, except that for some reason it's woven from a tungsten mesh, so it weighs 85 pounds and I'll need to carry it around on a hand cart." "That seems like a bad--" "BUT IT HAS THE PERFECT POCKET ARRANGEMENT!"

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

Although not permanently.

The social media reaction to this asteroid announcement has been sharply negative. Care to respond?

Poor Weeoming.

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

The LINACs in the glasses frames can barely manage one MeV. You should've gone to the screening at CERN.

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.

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

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

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

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

Neither group uses iso 8601 because the big-endian enthusiasts were all at the meeting 20 years ago.

Oh no, I haven't checked in with Yvonne in YEARS.

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

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

'Beyond that lies a vale of fire through which my vision cannot penetrate' is the kind of fun thing geologists, heliophysicists, and early universe cosmologists have a lot of opportunities to say.

All those GTA marathons during the pregnancy were a bad idea.

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.

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

Hey, I don't make the rules. It's in the book.

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

I'm not a lawyer, but I believe zones like this are technically considered the high seas, so if you cut a pizza into a spiral there you could be charged with pieracy under marinaritime law.

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.

Maybe if I put it in a box for a while with a speaker playing some pleasant pastoral music, I can reprogram it.

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.

Nearby, there were also no injuries when a multi-vortex tornado hit one of those spinning teacup rides.

We're going to have to work together to get over our hangups if we're going to learn to move on Catan's hexagonal grid. It's bad enough that we lost our crew of pawns when we passed within firing range of Battleship.

You can arrange a pickup of your sword in Rivendell between the hours of noon and 7:00 PM.

But one of the regulars in the channel is a girl!

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

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

The best camera is the one at L2.

I am firmly of the opinion that if something doesn't have a year on it, every time the expiration date rolls around it is good again for the two weeks preceding that date.

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

I don't see how; the C0 block is right there at the beginning.

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.

High-speed collisions at the Baby Park track may support the hypothesis that Daisy is her own evil twin, a theory first suggested by Nintendo in the game Majorana's Mask.

They didn't bring us a gift, but considering the kinetic energy of a bottle of wine at orbital speed, that's probably for the best.

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

The MythBusters need to tackle whether a black hole from the LHC could REALLY destroy the world.

For many of the anatomy pictures on Wikipedia, I think this is actually not far from reality. They only look all formal and professional due to careful cropping.

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

'If you keep trying to spray your collaborators with the beam when they're not looking, I'm turning off the ion source and NO one will get to play with the beam!' --Physics's mom

"röntgen" and "rem" are 20th-century physics terms that mean "no trespassing."

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

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

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

The symbol for degrees Felsius is an average of the Euro symbol (€) and the Greek lunate epsilon (ϵ).

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

Sometimes, you can tell Bloom filters are the wrong tool for the job, but when they're the right one you can never be sure.

So glad Kate over in R&D pushed for using the AlgoMaxAnalyzer to look into this. Hiring her was a great decisio- waaaait.

Frazzled scientists are requesting that everyone please stop generating hypotheses for a little bit while they work through the backlog.

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

The SLS head engineer plans to invite Shania Twain to stand under the completed prototype, then tell her, 'I don't expect you to date me just because I'm a rocket scientist, but you've gotta admit--this is pretty fucking impressive.'

The prereqs for CPSC 357, the class on package management, are CPSC 432, CPSC 357, and glibc2.5 or later.

P.P.S. I can kill you with my brain.

The HVAC bill for installing the Gulf Stream was enormous.

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?

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.

It's easy to regret your awkward conversations but hard to regret the ones you didn't have.

'And hypnotize someone into thinking they've uploaded it and passed it around.' 'But then won't the uploader get suspicious that it pauses at 301+ for a while? Why don't we just forge the number entirel--' ::BLAM:: 'The Council of 299 is adjourned.'

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

<A>: Like </a>this.

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

'At least humans are better at quietly amusing ourselves, oblivious to our pending obsolescence' thought the human, as a nearby Dell Inspiron contentedly displayed the same bouncing geometric shape screensaver it had been running for years.

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

The Mercator projection drastically distorts the size of almost every area of land except a small ring around the North and South Poles.

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.

We are sexy, sexy Von Neumann machines.

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

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

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

Running for office in Minnesota on the single-issue platform 'dig a permanent channel through the Traverse Gap because it will make this map more satisfying.'

'Hey, what are those futuristic goggles for, anyway?' 'Oh, this is just a broken Google Glass. It was 2010's night at the club.'

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

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

I have to pay with paper money.

We definitely put the pool in a mine for shielding. It was absolutely not to hide it from the funding people.

A good ²³⁸Umbrella policy should cover it.

Although really, the damage was done when the party planners took the hole punch to the elevator ribbon to hang up the sign.

Mr. Rogers projected an air of genuine, unwavering, almost saintly pure-hearted decency. But when you look deeper, at the person behind the image ... that's exactly what you find there, too. He's exactly what he appears to be.

(c) You can have a scooter when you pay for it yourself, and (d) if you can't learn to start a new thread rather than responding to an old one, you'll be banned. [thread locked by moderator]

We were going to do a falling-apart Rubik's cube that was just 27 independent blocks stuck together with magnets, but then we realized it was actually really cool and even kind of worked, so we cut that one.

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

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

IATA stands for International AirporT Abbreviation.

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

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

This car has 240% of a horse's decision-making ability and produces only 30% as much poop.

They also showed activation in the parts of the brain associated with exposure to dubious study methodology, concern about unremoved piercings, and exasperation with fMRI techs who won't stop talking about Warped Tour.

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

After initial tests created a series of large holes in the wall of the lab, the higher-power Scanning Tunneling Tennis Ball Microscope project was quickly shut down.

I always figured you should never bring a gun to a gun fight because then you'll be part of a gun fight.

2031: Google defends the swiveling roof-mounted scanning electron microscopes on its Street View cars, saying they 'don't reveal anything that couldn't be seen by any pedestrian scanning your house with an electron microscope.'

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.

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

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

Ugh, today's kids are forgetting the old-fashioned art of absentmindedly reading the same half-page of a book over and over and then letting your attention wander and picking up another book.

According to my mom, my first word was (looking up at the sky) 'Wow!'

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

I found an old tape of this episode in my family's closet. Check the news section of the forums to see the clip!

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

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

I'm just trying to explain, please don't be jealous! Man, why are all my relationships ruined by early 90's rappers?

Our nucleic acid recovery techinques found a great deal of homo sapiens DNA incorporated into the fossils, particularly the ones containing high levels of resin, leading to the theory that these dinosaurs preyed on the once-dominant primates.

"Oh my God, why did you scotch-tape a bunch of hammers together?" "It's ok! Nothing depends on this wall being destroyed efficiently."

Grandma's shelf-stable blackberry pie meson recipe was a huge seller until her farm was shut down by a joint FDA/NRC investigation.

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

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

The month names are the same, except that the fourth month only has the name 'April' in even-numbered years, and is otherwise unnamed.

Despite a reputation for safety, the temperatures and surprisingly high pressures make them even more dangerous than the air kind, but the NTSB refuses to investigate accidents because they insist there is no 'transportation' involved.

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

...wait until they type in payment information, then use it to order yourself a replacement phone.

It gets worse! You know that wizened old monk with the gypsy wife whose voodoo shop we smash up every day after school?

[Astronomer peers into telescope] [Jaws theme begins playing]

The Fujita Scale was replaced by the Enhanced Fujita Scale in 2007, but I think 'EF-5' sounds stupid, so I vote we just use the new measurements for assigning numbers but still call them 'F-whatever'.

"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."

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

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

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

"It's not an influenza, but the onset has notes of the '09 H1N1 strain." "Ah yes, that was a good year for H1N1."

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

"The committee appreciates that your 2020 launch is on track, but the 'human capital/personnel retention' budget includes a lot more unmarked cash payments than usual. What are th--" "Public outreach."

My other (much harder) hobby is trying to engineer situations where I have an excuse to use more than one of them in short succession.

You were on the internet before I was born? Well, so was I.

The growth rate of items per day may may seem absurd, but it's actually much less than the acceleration in the 12 Days of Christmas song.

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

'And ovaries. Man, ovaries, huh?' [awkward pause] '... faithfully.'

No other experiment has a lower false negative rate.

It's like you tried to define a formal grammar based on fragments of a raw database dump from the QuickBooks file of a company that's about to collapse in an accounting scandal.

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

Oh no, Murphy just picked up the razor.

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

Add main-belt asteroids to taste.

It's like one teraspoon / when all you need is a kilonife

If it's over water, and you can't get a boat or revise the rules to preserve the makeout, there is no helping you.

If they're going to make people ride bikes and scooters in traffic, then it should at LEAST be legal to do the Snow Crash thing where you use a hook-shot-style harpoon to catch free rides from cars.

Ties are broken by whoever was closest to the surface of Europa when they were born.

It's not just time zones and leap seconds. SI seconds on Earth are slower because of relativity, so there are time standards for space stuff (TCB, TGC) that use faster SI seconds than UTC/Unix time. T2 - T1 = [God doesn't know and the Devil isn't telling.]

When speaking out loud, you can can call it the 'Perseids meatier shower' and no one will ever know. (If you do get caught somehow, just tell them to Google the 'Kentucky meat shower' and that will distract them while you escape.)

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

Maybe we should give up on the whole idea of a 'back' button. 'Show me that thing I was looking at a moment ago' might just be too complicated an idea for the modern web.

I mean, the black-and-white stuff was running backward, but it hardly mattered to the story.

When an Ur guy / sells Nanni things / but the copper's bad, / He simply records his complaint for all time / "I got a bad deal / I'm maaaaad"

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

Adding data for South Korea but with their cases scaled to match the population of Japan and the land area of Australia, and vice versa.

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

1937-2020

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.

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

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.

SUB[59]: The submission numbers for my accepted OEIS submissions in chronological order

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

This white-balance illusion hit so hard because it felt like someone had been playing through the Monty Hall scenario and opened their chosen door, only to find there was unexpectedly disagreement over whether the thing they'd revealed was a goat or a car.

It works because a nautical mile is based on a degree of latitude, and the Earth (e) is a circle.

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

It's possible to do sea navigation without a compass, but you'll have to get some spoilers from the Polynesians.

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.

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

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

Imagine you could ride alongside a sound wave. It would probably be pretty cool, right? We're putting in a departmental budget request to buy a really fast plane so we can check it out.

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

Dvorak words may sound hard to pronounce, but studies show they actually put less stress on the vocal cords.

Fermions are weird about each other in a standoffish way. Integer-spin particles are weird about each other in a 'stand uncomfortably close while talking' kind of way.

This was actually drawn years before Red Spiders

This one makes me wince every time I think about it

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

Or love in general, for that matter. It just leads to the idea that either your love is pure, perfect, and eternal, and you are storybook-compatible in every way with no problems, or you're LYING when you say 'I love you'.

To me, trying to understand song lyrics feels like when I see text in a dream but it𝔰 hอᵣd t₀ ᵣeₐd aกd 𝒾 canٖt fཱྀcu༧༦࿐༄

This is true. The lyrics are ridiculous.

When I look into your eyes, I see JPEG artifacts. I can tell by the pixels that we're wrong for each other.

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.

It'd be great if some news network started featuring partisan hack talking heads who were all Federalists and Jacksonians, just to see how long it took us to catch on.

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

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.

When designing an interface, imagine that your program is all that stands between the user and hot, sweaty, tangled-bedsheets-fingertips-digging-into-the-back sex.

About one in three North American subway stops are in NYC.

I understand modern autogyros are much more stable, so I've probably angered the autogyro people by impugning their safety. Once they finish building the autogyros they've been working on in their garages for 10 years, they'll come after me.

I wonder if that friendly lady ever fixed the problem she was having with her headset.

You have to be careful doing this. Sometimes, when you push the whisker down, dynamite explodes.

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

Our experiment will be expensive, but we believe it will produce important spin-offs, especially if we manage to hit the sun from the right angle.

I'm trying to be healthier, so after I eat this brick of cheese, I'll have a spoonful of grease-soaked vegetables.

And to you, I leave my life-sized ice sculpture replica of the Pietà which was blessed by the Pope. You must never let it melt! Now, remember, all gifts must be removed from my estate within 24 hours.

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

Merge branch 'asdfasjkfdlas/alkdjf' into sdkjfls-final

His books were kinda intimidating; rappelling down through his skylight seemed like the best option.

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.

Wow, ANIMORPHS-NOVEL.RTF? Just gonna, uh, go through and delete that from all my archives real quick.

The creepy fingers that grow from a vibrating cornstarch-water mix can be modeled as a chain of inverted vertical pendulums (DOI:10.1039/c4sm00265b) and are believed to be the fingers of Maxwell's Demon trying to push through into our universe.

Replace the pendulums with history students and you'll qualify for a grant!

I'm gonna have to add something to the strum bar so it makes a clicky sound like the old controllers. I'm so used to the feedback; the silence throws me off.

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

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

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

The discovery of a fully typographical star system comes with a big asterisk.

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.

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

As far as treachery-as-driving-music goes, Katamari music is matched only by Guitar Hero music.

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.

You can also just mash the keyboard at random, but you might end up with a gibberish name no one can pronounce.

This isn't an informational illustration; this is a thing I think we should do. First, we'll need a gigantic spool of thread. Next, we'll need some kind of ... hmm, time to head to Seattle.

Qua qua qua is the sine qua non of sine qua non qua sine qua non.

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

For the moment it's a standoff

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

This comic shows estimated average frequency. I wanted to include the pitch drop experiment, but it turns out the gif format has some issues with decade-long loops.

Look, you can't complain about this after giving us so many scenarios involving N locked chests and M unlabeled keys.

Do you think you could actually clean the living room at some point, though?

In fact, draw all your rotational matrices sideways. Your professors will love it! And then they'll go home and shrink.

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.

I need a lawn, so I can yell at kids to stay off it.

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

The two best reasons to get into fossils are booping trilobites and getting to say the word "fossiliferous" a lot.

Hey! No running in the back-arc basin!

And nothing for 'I'm glad I saw Epic Movie.'

"Symbolic integration" is when you theatrically go through the motions of finding integrals, but the actual result you get doesn't matter because it's purely symbolic.

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

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

FYI: The 'drop, cover, and hold on' advice only applies to earthquakes. If you encounter a mountain lion, you should absolutely not drop to the ground, crawl under it, and hold on to one of its legs.

This works for a surprising range of sunlit things, including rooftops (sure), highway surfaces (probably not), sailboats (maybe), and jets, cars, and wild deer (haha good luck).

1,300,000-1,400,000 ft: Ask a crew member to show you how to use the ISS food warmer.

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!

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

At least I never gave her the root password.

"Radians Fahrenheit or radians Celsius?" "Uh, sorry, gotta go!"

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

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

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

Science should be exactly as cool as the headlines sound. Like the 'RUSSIANS CUT APART AND REASSEMBLE DOGS' thing.

Washington, DC: Eastern gray squirrel, Amur honeysuckle. Puerto Rico: Crested anole, sea grape. US as a whole: Mallard, eastern poison ivy.

Hi! Someone call for me? I'm a superhero who specializes in the study of God's creation of Man in the Book of Genesi-- HOLY SHIT A GIANT BUG!

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

I got to check off 'Make something called xkcd' early.

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

"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."

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

Hipster CDC Reports Flu Epidemic Peaked Years Ago

They left the belt drive in place but switched which wheel was powered, so people could choose between a regular ride, a long ride, and a REALLY long ride.

Someone's probably working on an eBook app where, if you stop reading right before some plot twist happens, the app will wait a while and then send you a breaking news alert about what's happening, prompting you to open it and read the next few pages to learn more.

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

Massage: Theoretical (10), Quantum (6), High-energy (2), Computational (1), Marine (1), Astro- (None)

"How does the spring not run out almost immediately?" "We pull it back REALLY far."

Dear Diary: UNSUBSCRIBE

This would be bad enough, but every 30th or 40th pokéball has TWO of them inside.

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

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

Water/ice has a lot of weird phases. Maybe asking 'where do birds go when it rains' is like asking 'where does Clark Kent go whenever Superman shows up?'

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

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

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

Hang on, we got a call from the feds. They say we can do whatever with him, but the EPA doesn't want that laptop in the ocean. They're sending a team.

Although I hear they were caught cheating off of Rosalind, who sat at a desk in front of them.

I wanted to make the world's fastest yawl, so I made the aft sail bigger, but apparently that means it's not a yawl anymore! It's a real ketch-22.

You fancy me mad. Could a madman have outsmarted the greatest electronica/techno artists of our era? Next to fall will be Roderick Usher's house/trance band.

He's kind of an asshole, when you think about it

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

Stephen Douglas actually died soon after the debates and election, but if you demand historical accuracy in your webcomics you should be reading Hark! A Vagrant.

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

They should add a little sticker that certifies that the humidifier supports water conservation, but in the sense of energy conservation or momentum conservation.

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.

Hard to imagine political rhetoric more microtargeted at me than 'I love Venn diagrams. I really do, I love Venn diagrams. It's just something about those three circles.'

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.

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

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.

It can't be very MUCH money ... they apparently can't even afford a sampler. I mean, with a little remixing, some of this could be kinda good!

You'd need to keep track of so many people! Would you use, like, Excel or something? Far too fancy for a simple country nanoenzyme developer like me.

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

And a different ghost has replaced me in the bedroom.

New phone OS features: Infinite customization (home screen icons no longer snap to grid), dark mode (disables screen), screaming mode (self-explanatory), and coherent ultracapacitor-pumped emission (please let us know what this setting does; we've been afraid to try it).

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

At first I thought I would need some gold or something to pay him, but then I realized that it was the 18th century and I could just bring a roll of aluminum foil.

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

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.

Don't click on the wing.

Not only is that terrible in general, but you just KNOW Billy's going to open the root present first, and then everyone will have to wait while the heap is rebuilt.

In 1899, people were walking around shouting '23' at each other and laughing, and confused reporters were writing articles trying to figure out what it meant.

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

That shirt looks good on you, but it would look even better stuffed into the neck of a vodka bottle and flung burning through our office building's window. Let's fucking do it and never look back.

How do I work it? IT'S ALREADY WORKING!

I mean, what's more likely -- that I have uncovered fundamental flaws in this field that no one in it has ever thought about, or that I need to read a little more? Hint: it's the one that involves less work.

In months other than September, the 11th is mentioned substantially less often than any other date. It's been that way since long before 9/11 and I have no idea why.

RIP, Gary.

Opening dialogue by Scott

For some reason the water in my pool is green and there's a weird film on the surface #nofilter

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

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

Others include "We've incrementally improved the estimate of this coefficient," "Maybe all these categories are wrong," and "We found a way to make student volunteers worse at tasks."

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.

Friends with detriments.

The only post to achieve perfect balance between the four was a hilarious joke about Mark Zuckerberg getting caught using a pseudonym to sneak past the TSA.

It's fun to watch browsers fumblingly recapitulate the history of window management. Someday we'll have xmonad as a Firefox extension.

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.

Maybe I should let up on Megatokyo a little?

It's a linear extrapolation, Michael. How big could the error be? 10%?

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

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.

This is my four-digit PIN. It was passed down to me by my father, and someday I will pass it on to you. Unless we figure out how to update it, but that sounds complicated.

Certain hybrid events can only happen in certain locations where all the conditions are present; chasers flock to the area in and around Kansas known as tumbleweed-colliding-with-possum alley.

I've developed a more logical set of rules but the people on the chess community have a bunch of stupid emotional biases and won't reply to my posts.

The only effect on the history books were a few confusing accounts of something called 'Greek fire.'

The Singularity happened, but not to us.

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

I always have to turn off nature documentaries when they show these scenes.

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

'YOUR CLOTHES. GIVE THEM TO ME.' 'Shit, uh ... you are now breathing manually!' 'I AM ALWAYS BREATHING MANUALLY.'

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.

I'm entering my 24th year of spending eight hours a day firing the Duck Hunt gun at the flying toasters. I'm sure I'll hit one soon.

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

"The police told me I can't be a doctor, but whenever they show up I just go into the Google Maps settings page I found and change the house to 'Police Headquarters' and then they have to do what I say."

But the windows! What if there's a voyeur watchi-- wait, now I'm turned on too.

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

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

At this point, if we're going to keep insisting on portraying dinosaurs as featherless because it's "cooler", it's time to apply that same logic to art involving bald eagles.

Apple uses automated schnapps IVs.

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

To get more knowledge

PYTHON FLAG ENABLE THREE LAWS

You may point out that strictly speaking, you can use that statement to prove that all risks are tiny--to which I reply HOLY SHIT WATCH OUT FOR THAT DOG!

Other pollsters complain about declining response rates, but our poll showed that 96% of respondents would be 'somewhat likely' or 'very likely' to agree to answer a series of questions for a survey.

Your problem is so terrible, I worry that, if I help you, I risk drawing the attention of whatever god of technology inflicted it on you.

After a pail of water was thrown on the Wicked Witch of the West outside Salt Lake City, Utah's Great Salt Lake was measured to be 7 parts per trillion witch by volume.

I actually kind of feel like John and Surf King wouldn't like each other, which is a lot to unpack.

He probably just poops over the side of the sleigh.

NO DRAMA ZONE -> If I've made you sad, you'd better not tell me, because I am TERRIFIED of that situation and have NO IDEA how to handle it.

Mathematicians quickly determined that it spells ANT BNECN, an unusual theoretical dish which was not successfully cooked until Andrew Wiles made it for breakfast in the 1990s.

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

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

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

Electric skateboards, by cost, get the equivalent of about 300 miles per gallon. Lithium batteries just need to get cheaper.

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

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

It can take a site a while to figure out that there's a problem with their 'report a bug' form.

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

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

Universes in mirror, like those in windshield, are larger than they appear.

Better change the URL to 'https' before downloading.

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

Every time we detect an asteroid from outside the Solar System, we should immediately launch a mission to fling one of our asteroids back in the direction it came from.

A few minutes later, the goat from behind door C drives away in the car.

Also, it's not like anyone actually calls up the Nobel committee to double-check things.

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!

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

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.

Old people used to write obnoxious thinkpieces about how people these days always wear watches and are slaves to the clock, but now they've switched to writing thinkpieces about how kids these days don't appreciate the benefits of an old-fashioned watch. My position is: The word 'thinkpiece' sounds like a word made up by someone who didn't know about the word 'brain'.

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.

Maybe I haven't been to Iceland because I'm busy dealing with YOUR crummy code.

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

It's like a half-solved cryptogram where the solution is a piece of FORTH code written by someone who doesn't know FORTH.

NO FATE BUT THE NARRATIVES WE IMPOSE ON LIFE'S RANDOM CHAOS TO DISTRACT OURSELVES FROM OUR EXISTENTIAL PLIGHT

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

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

There's no group chat member more enigmatic than the cool person who you all assume has the chat on mute, but who then instantly chimes in with no delay the moment something relevant to them is mentioned.

When I was a kid, I asked my parents why our houses didn't have toothpaste pipes in addition to water ones. I'm strangely pleased to see Amazon thinking the same way.

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

To generate #1 albums, 'jay --help' recommends the -z flag.

Things Leonhard Euler created ( most of math ( overlapping circle diagrams ) a cricket bowling machine ) Things John Venn created

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

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

He sees you when you're sleeping, he knows when you're awake, he's copied on /var/spool/mail/root, so be good for goodness' sake.

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

Or perhaps they knew he was there, and were just trying to torment him first.

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

Thankfully for everyone involved, the Winter Olympics officials spotted me and managed to stop me before I got to the ski jump.

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

'I can't believe I'm saying this, but I wish Aquaman were here instead--HE'D be able to help.'

It turns out that saying "Oh, so THAT'S why they call it Boxing Day" is a good way to get punched a second time.

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

Listen, in a few thousand years you'll invent a game called 'SimCity' which has a 'disaster' button, and then you'll understand.

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

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!

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

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

The rarest of all clouds is the altocumulenticulostratonimbulocirruslenticulomammanoctilucent cloud, caused by an interaction between warm moist air, cool dry air, cold slippery air, cursed air, and a cloud of nanobots.

Under some circumstances, if you throw a D8 and then a D12 at an enemy, thanks to the D8's greater pointiness you actually have to roll a D12 and D8 respectively to determine damage.

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!

Ugh, it says they attempted delivery but "Nobody was home."

The reverse only works if the subject has a nervous twitch.

We never see any time travelers because they all discover it's a huge mistake. This is also why your friend at the lab suddenly looked about a year older recently.

m-x machineofdeath-mode

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

CONFLICT OF INTEREST STATEMENT: The authors hope these results are correct because we all want to be cool people who are good at science.

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