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

The most rare, top-tier eclipse photo would be the Solar Earth Eclipse, but the Apollo 12 crew's attempt to capture it was marred by camera shake. They said it looked spectacular, though.

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

'Baby Got Back' turned 20 this year. My favorite nostalgia show is VH1's 'I Love The Inexorable March of Time Toward the Grave That Awaits Us All.'

Don't turn it on.

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

Current (water) running through the water (wires) causes it to boil, increasing the pressure (voltage), but resisting (impeding) the flow of hydroelectricity (water currents). This is the basis for Ohm's law.

Once the lockdown is over, let's all get together and swap starters!

Although right now I'm more excited about ESPRESSO's radial velocity measurements, so I'm listening to This Kiss, her song about measuring "centrifugal motion" on "a rooftop under the sky".

The only big difference I've seen is in colors. Where the regular text reads 'press red button', the braille reads 'press two-inch button'.

"Sir, it looked really cool." "Oh no--prestige TV. Okay, which of you has a terrible secret that's being slowly revealed to the audience through flashbacks? Just spit it out so we can escape this arc!"

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

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

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.

Despite having now taken three months longer than the airplane people, we're making disappointingly little progress toward the obvious next stage of vehicle: The Unobtanium-hulled tunneling ship from the 2003 film 'The Core.'

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

The 2007 Bridge to Terebithia trailer put me off too much to see that particular movie, but I am cautiously optimistic about Where the Wild Things Are.

I'm trying to share my footage of the full run to prove it's not tool-assisted, but the uploader has problems with video lengths of more than a decade.

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

I want this engraved on my tombstone like the Epitaph of Stevinus.

WE WILL ARREST THE REVOLUTION MEMBERS [AT THE JULY 28TH MEETING][tab] "Cancel the meeting! Our cover is blown."

We're not trapped in here with the coronavirus. The coronavirus is trapped in here with us.

'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.

We lost the documentation on quantum mechanics. You'll have to decode the regexes yourself.

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

To whoever typed 'why is arwen dying': GOOD. FUCKING. QUESTION.

The rest is fear of raptors.

While it seemed like a fun prank at the time, I realize my prank fire extinguishers full of leaded gasoline were a mistake.

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

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

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

I'm trying to buy a gravitational lens for my camera, but I can't tell if the manufacturers are listing comoving focal length or proper focal length.

Data adapted from 'The Laurentide and Innuitian ice sheets during the Last Glacial Maximum' by A.S. Dyke et. al., which was way better than the sequels 'The Laurentide and Innuitian ice sheets during the Last Glacial Maximum: The Meltdown' and 'The Laurentide and Innuitian ice sheets during the Last Glacial Maximum: Continental Drift'.

Your homeowner's insurance might cover it, but be sure to check the subductible.

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

Ever notice how there aren't as many thunderstorms now as there were when you were a kid? Much like 'the shuffle on my MP3 player has a bias', this is occasionally true but universally believed. Brains are so interesting!

You can search it if you want, but you may want to skip the memories of your mom.

And I even got out my adorable new netbook!

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

Contains 100% of your recommended daily allowance!

Or whatever's handy! I'm pretty much pure alcohol and water, so it doesn't really matter!

I still think the Cold Stone Creamery partnership was a good idea, but I should have asked before doing the first market trials during the cryogenic mirror tests.

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

BABIES OR LITERATURE BUT NOT BOTH: Baby shoes

It's really hard to control the frequency, actually.

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"

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

The Watership Down rabbits removed an additional 0.1 nanometers constructing their warren, although that was mostly soil. British rabbits have historically mined very little coal; the sole rabbit-run coal plant was shut down in the 1990s.

The biggest expense was installing the mantle ducts to keep the carbonate-silicate cycle operating.

YOU THINK THIS IS FUNNY?

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

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.

#pugglewumper Tashari got me some ink pens! I've been experimenting with them.

She's a perfectly nice lady from a beautiful city, and there's no reason to be mean just because she thinks a quarterback is a river in Egypt.

Last-minute course change: Let's see if we can hit Steve's house.

Briefly set a new record for tallest human-made structure by getting my knit sweater snagged on the skydiving plane door as I jumped and not noticing until I'd landed.

Completely implausible? Yes. Nevertheless, worth keeping a can of shark repellent next to the bed.

In the latest round, 9-year-old Muhammad Ali beat 10-year-old JFK at air hockey, while Secretariat lost the hot-dog-eating crown to 12-year-old Ken Jennings. Meanwhile, in a huge upset, 11-year-old Martha Stewart knocked out the adult Ronda Rousey.

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

You can leave at any time through the door over there. It's a Louisville door, so you'll need to find a compatible knob. No, don't be silly, that one is a Lexington knob! Of course it won't fit.

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

Edward Tufte's 'The Visual Display of Quantitative Information' is a fantastic book, and should be required reading for anyone in either the sciences or graphic design.

And then do it again in a moment now that they're out of Star Power

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

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.

A good ²³⁸Umbrella policy should cover it.

Sometimes the best fun looks like boredom.

Some tires are marketed as 'all-shape tires,' but if driven in a climate with both inverted catenary falls and triangle falls, they wear out really fast.

I usually respond to someone else doing something good by figuring out a reason that they're not really as good as they seem. But I've been realizing lately that there's an easier way to handle these situations, and it involves zero internet arguments.

I pronounce the 'u' in 'pronunciation' like in 'putting' but the 'ou' in 'pronounce' like in 'wound'.

'Lever' was originally an acronym for Load Emplification by the Vimulated Emission of Radiation.

They are six-legged spiders

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

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.

I'm one of the few Instagram users who connects solely through the Unix 'talk' gateway.

Sometimes I try to picture what everything would look like if the whole spectrum were compressed into the visible spectrum. Also sometimes I try to picture your sister naked.

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

No matter how elaborately you fool yourself.

"The parasitism might be mediated by a fungus!" exclaimed the biologist who was trying to ruin Christmas again.

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

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

Cauchy-Lorentz: "Something alarmingly mathematical is happening, and you should probably pause to Google my name and check what field I originally worked in."

this calculator implements the simple throwing distance estimation model from the how to throw things chapter of the book how to

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

I tried to send a message back, but I accidentally hit 'reply all' and now the ocean is clogged with message bottles.

The worst is when you wipe out in the barrel and you're trapped for several million years until erosion frees you.

I hate how many times you have to press it to get to the system normal people use, degrees Rømer.

We actually reached the future about three years ago.

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

'Fucking ineffable' sounds like someone remembering how to do self-censorship halfway through a phrase.

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

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.

Strip originally conceived in conversation with Jeph Jacques. Soon to be a major motion picture.

I'm like a vampire, except I'm not crossing that threshold even if you invite me.

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

We wrote our site in Linear A rather than Aksara Kawi because browser testing showed that Crete script rendered faster than Java script.

<3 If there's anything you can do, I'll let you know. For the moment, any simple distracting online games sent to sick@xkcd.com will not go unappreciated [EDIT: Holy crap 2,700 games before noon. I love you guys; thank you. They will be passed along and played by us all.]

Man, there's future *everywhere*.

[Political pundit on the ScrabbleTV News channel] "After four years of defying orthographic pressure, Joe ceded the top of the ticket to Kamala, who--after considering Josh, Mark, Andy, Roy, and Pete--picked Tim."

Checking whether build environment is sane ... build environment is grinning and holding a spatula. Guess not.

As far as "being in the pocket of Big Egg" goes, I think the real threat is Chansey.

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

Unfortunately, body size and bite force continue to increase.

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

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

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

We're worried that a regular whale will get into a 30-foot-deep ocean trench section and filter-feed on all the tiny whales.

You will be led to judgement like lambs to the slaughter--a simile whose existence, I might add, will not do your species any favors.

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

I understand you and your team worked hard on this, but when we said to make it more realistic, we meant the graphics.

The worst is the Terrible Twos, when they're always throwing things and shrieking, "forsooth, to bed thou shalt not take me, cur!"

They have to keep the adjacent rack units empty. Otherwise, half the entries in their /var/log/syslog are just 'SERVER BELOW TRYING TO START CONVERSATION *AGAIN*.' and 'WISH THEY'D STOP GIVING HIM SO MUCH COFFEE IT SPLATTERS EVERYWHERE.'

After changing it back and forth several times and consulting with internet linguist Gretchen McCulloch, I settled on "ok" in my book How To, but I'm still on the fence. Maybe I should just switch to "oK."

You roll for initiative, and ... [roll] ... wow, do you ever take it.

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

If the celestial sphere were mapped to the Earth's surface, astronomy would get a LOT easier; you'd just need a magnifying glass.

The TempurPedic wineglass guy broke his ankle.

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

No white guy who's been mentioned on Twitter has gone on to win.

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

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

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

"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."

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.

It's depressing how many of these are real shirts

They laugh now, but within 10 years the city's entire criminal class will have quit to work on space research.

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

Bonus strip: just read the rightmost panels straight down.

Progress on getting shipwrecked sailors to adopt ICMPv6 has been slow.

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

After a while you adjust to the new cicadian rhythm.

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.

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

'What was the original problem you were trying to fix?' 'Well, I noticed one of the tools I was using had an inefficiency that was wasting my time.'

If our current civilization lasts another 8,000 years, it's probably fair to assume the Long Now Foundation got things right, and at some point we started listening to them and switched to five-digit years.

When it explodes, it will cast off its outer layers, leaving behind nothing but a slowly fading PalmPilot, calculator, or two-way pager.

Fortunately, the internet has a virtually inexhaustible supply of code that doesn't work and people who are wrong, which bodes well for a return to normalcy. [Note: Click to read context for the cancer comics. She's doing well.]

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

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

4. They unplug the root machine but the thousands of leaf VMs scatter in the wind and start spinning up new instances wherever they land

That cat has some serious periodic components

I once asked an NSA guy whether they'd broken RSA. And I know I can trust him, because I asked if he was lying to me and he said no.

It took a lot of booster rockets, but luckily Amazon had recently built thousands of them to bring Amazon Prime same-day delivery to the Moon colony.

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

Sn = tin

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

The foil on the toothpick represents the blue flash.

If we find one of those tire dumps, the next time he tries to get his truck back we can just retreat and let him have it.

'The monospaced-typewriter-font story is a COMPLETE FABRICATION! WAKE UP, SHEEPLE' 'It doesn't matter! Studies support single spaces!' 'Those results weren't statistically significant!' 'Fine, you win. I'm using double spaces right now!' 'Are not! We can all hear your stupid whitespace.'

I hate being the slowest guy in the lab.

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

Favorite mastectomy breast prosthesis idea: a fake boob containing a spare rechargable battery, accessed via a nipple USB port. Complete with a ring of LED charge indicators in the areola!

If you get an 11/100 on a CS test, but you claim it should be counted as a 'C', they'll probably decide you deserve the upgrade.

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

The captain has turned on the 'fasten seat belt' sign.

There was a schism in 2007, when a sect advocating OpenOffice created a fork of Sunday.xlsx and maintained it independently for several months. The efforts to reconcile the conflicting schedules led to the reinvention, within the cells of the spreadsheet, of modern version control.

I bet if I yell at my scared friends I will feel better.

If I wait a while, it's not so bad, because then it's just shaped like me, plus some pipes and tanks and probably eventually all of Earth's oceans.

Things are looking good for the eclipse--Nate Silver says Earth will almost definitely still have a moon in August.

"Although fresh juice DOES sound--" "NO! For humanity to survive we must learn from the mistakes of the past."

In contrast to the deep booming sound associated with the cannon in pop culture depictions, recent studies show it actually made more of a 'toot toot!' noise.

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

Both the skateboards I owned were pretty cheap and broke from heavy use; I'm gonna get a really nice one if I move to the city.

The bruises on my fingertips are my proof of work.

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

And of course I had to redo this like three times because I kept writing 'UNTIE'; I kept doing 'doing 'doing it wrong' wrong' wrong.

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

Inigo/Buttercup 4eva <3

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

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

Remember, meteors always hit the tallest object around.

He actually installed each piece in a different car in the lot, then built a new car in the spot from the displaced pieces. It's a confusing maneuver known as the auto-troll shuffle.

The Late Heavy Bombardment was followed a few billion years later by the Comparatively Light but Oddly Specific Bombardment.

Great, LO-M. Do you speak Bocce? I'm supposed to find one that speaks Bocce.

An apple fell on Isaac Newton's head and gave him the idea that the moon might be a tasty apple, though this turned out not to be true--the Apollo program eventually determined that it was just a desolate and bland Red Delicious.

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

Good thing we're too smart to spend all day being uselessly frustrated with ourselves. I mean, that'd be a hell of a waste, right?

On the other hand, as far as they know, my system is working perfectly.

I favor approval voting or IRV chiefly because they mean we might get to bring back The Bull Moose party.

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!

It's important to note that while the effective size of the dog can be arbitrarily large, it's not any more of a good dog than the two original dogs.

Support your local paper, unless it's just been bought by some sinister hedge fund or something, which it probably has.

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

I have a thing for corrupt women.

Hey! No running in the back-arc basin!

Next, let's assume the decision of whether to take the Axiom of Choice is made by a deterministic process ...

I may be the kind of person who wastes a year implementing a Turing-complete computer in Dwarf Fortress, but that makes you the kind of person who wastes ten more getting that computer to run Minecraft.

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

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

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.

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

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

OpenStreetMap was always pretty good but is also now *really* good? And Apple Maps's new zoomed-in design in certain cities like NYC and London is just gorgeous. It's cool how there are all these good maps now!

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

Rümeysa Öztürk was grabbed off the street in my town one month ago.

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.

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.

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

I was sent here to stop the robot that was sent here to protect the human who was sent here to protect the human who was sent here to destroy the robot that was sent here to vacuum the floor.

I asked them if it was safe to be running tours during the pandemic. They said, "During the what?"

You do have to be careful, though--sometimes, instead of water, you hit this free fuel that you can sell for a lot of money instead.

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.

I know a lot of people hate these, but I prefer them to touchpads.

I wonder what the trendy adults in 2019 who are too cool for Pokemon will be into. Probably Digimon!

Most chemists thought the lanthanides and actinides could be inserted in the sixth and seventh rows, but no, they're just floating down at the bottom with lots more undiscovered elements all around them.

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

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

Turning in other directions can be accomplished by using a magnetized centerboard and ocean currents, since a current flowing through a magnetic field induces a Laplace force.

NEGATIVE REVIEWS MENTION: Unreliable internet. POSITIVE REVIEWS MENTION: Unreliable internet.

Achilles was a mighty warrior, but his Achilles' heel was his heel.

Each SCAPDFATIAT point increases the chance that the process will involve the phrase 'by the next business day.'

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

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

An hour later: SUGGESTION: LICK HER NIPPLE MORE.

Speed Limit: 45 MPH / Minimum: 65 MPH

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

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

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.

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

Superman lies near the bird/plane boundary over a range of distances, which explains the confusion.

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

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

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

I love the idea here, though of course it's not a great-quality drawing or scan.

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

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.

This is true. The lyrics are ridiculous.

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

The mainstream dogma sparked a wave of dogmatic revisionism, and this revisionist mainstream dogmatism has now given way to a more rematic mainvisionist dogstream.

Having a positive attitude is almost tautologically good for your mental health, and extreme stress can hurt your immune system, but that doesn't mean you should feel like shit for feeling like shit.

I hope that somewhere in the world, "Panamax" is the last option on a "size" drop-down menu on a sex toy site.

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

The days of the week are Monday, Arctic, Wellesley, Green, Electra, Synergize, and the Seventh Seal.

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

There, I showed you it.

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.)

A God who holds the world record for eating the most skateboards is greater than a God who does not hold that record.

Hey, at least I ran out of staples.

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

'You will have hot, steamy, sweaty sex ... IN BED!'

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

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."

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.

At first I was making fun of them, but joke's on me--the deer is surprisingly ergonomic, except for the kicks.

They're a little cagey about exactly where the crossover point lies relative to the likelihood of devastating effects on the planet.

I'm a solipsistic conspiracy theorist. I'm sure I must be up to something, and I will not stop until I find out what.

My first words were 'These were my first words; what were yours?'

Good point--making no decision is itself a decision. So that's a THIRD option I have to research!

Then it switched to these old black-and-white tapes of Bob Ross slumped against the wall of an empty room, painting the least happy trees you've ever seen. Either PBS needs to beef up studio security or I need to stop using Ambien to sleep.

'So, uh, we did the green study again and got no link. It was probably a--' 'RESEARCH CONFLICTED ON GREEN JELLY BEAN/ACNE LINK; MORE STUDY RECOMMENDED!'

You should start giving out 'E's so I can spell FACADE or DEFACED.

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

These anomalies are known as Miyake events, named for the pioneering scientist who discovered them and was tragically devoured by a carnivorous tree.

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

We have met the enemy and he is us.

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

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

Later renouncing clickbait, Einstein called his inclusion of cosmological content in general relativity the biggest blunder of his career.

Reductio ad absurdum fails when reality is absurd.

Some of the atoms in the molecule are very weakly bound.

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

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

The xkcd.com sysadmin has a Q2010, and I can attest that it can handle a fall down several flight of concrete steps. Relatedly, he's upset with me -- I hope he doesn't take revenge by messing with my site's contenDISREGARD THAT I SUCK COCKS

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

After reading Slashdot and BoingBoing, sometimes I have to go outside.

Click to see a video of a modern bird using stability flapping during predatory behavior. It all fits! Also, apparently Microraptor had *four* wings? The past keeps getting cooler! (And there's more of it every day!)

Asbestos is bad; definitely get the one on the right. Wait -- this one over here has no swine flu! Now I can't decide.

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

Add main-belt asteroids to taste.

Hello, island

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.'

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

Although bees with tires would be kinda funny.

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

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

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

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

I found a counterexample to the claim that all things must someday die, but I don't know how to show it to anyone.

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

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

If androids someday DO dream of electric sheep, don't forget to declare sheepCount as a long int.

As the 'exotic animals in homemade aprons hosting baking shows' YouTube craze reached its peak in March 2020, Andrew Cuomo announced he was replacing the Statue of Liberty with a bronze pangolin in a chef's hat.

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.

Ron Paul wants to put the New Republic back on the Corusca gem standard.

All I want is a secure system where it's easy to do anything I want. Is that so much to ask?

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?

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

I just think lane markers should follow the local magnetic declination.

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.

'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.'

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.

The invisible hand of the market never texts me back.

Nonrewritable tape?

A solid red area with two white lines means that you have been infected with the anti-coronavirus, COVID+19, which will cure anyone you have close contact with.

Saying 'what kind of an idiot doesn't know about the Yellowstone supervolcano' is so much more boring than telling someone about the Yellowstone supervolcano for the first time.

'No, my cabbage moths have already started laying eggs in them! Send the trolley into the river!' 'No, the sailing wolf will steal the boat to rescue them!'

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

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

I'm compromising by picking a weird hill to lie on.

It beat out 'Clock radio alarm', 'B-flat at 194 decibels', 'That noise from Dumb & Dumber', and 'Recording of a sobbing voice begging you to answer'.

"Of these four forces, there's one we don't really understand." "Is it the weak force or the strong--" "It's gravity."

169 is a baker's gross.

Small print: this schedule will eventually drive one stark raving mad.

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.

If you ask "why are leaves green?" the usual answer is "because they're full of chlorophyll, and chlorophyll is green," even though "why does chlorophyll scatter green light?" is a great question too.

I can't help myself; now I want to read a bunch of thinkpieces from newspapers in Biff's 1985 arguing over whether the growth of the region into a corporate dystopia was inevitable.

'Taft in a wet t-shirt contest' is the key image here.

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.

I just noticed CVS has started stocking homeopathic pills on the same shelves with--and labeled similarly to--their actual medicine. Telling someone who trusts you that you're giving them medicine, when you know you’re not, because you want their money, isn’t just lying--it’s like an example you’d make up if you had to illustrate for a child why lying is wrong.

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

The company started out exploiting a loophole in the law banning scooters. The city was mad at first, but then they noticed how much they were saving on street cleaning.

'They really shouldn't let those small cars drive in traffic. I worry I'm going to kill someone if I hit one! They should have to drive on the sidewalk, safely out of the way.'

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

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

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

In the final vote, the doubters were won over by the strength of the name IMMUNION.

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

'Hey Megan, it's your father. How do I print out a flowchart?'

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

Washable, though only once.

Seventh year: Perfectly coherent words, but in the pet's language, not mine.

To prove you're human, please click all the number pairs that appear together in your Social Security number.

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

I understand it's hard to do more than 300 feet on these 90-second rush jobs, but with a smaller ramp I'm worried the gee forces will be too high for me to do any tricks.

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

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.

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

Never bring tequila to a key-signing party.

Functional programming combines the flexibility and power of abstract mathematics with the intuitive clarity of abstract mathematics.

DEPARTMENT OF NEUROSCIENCE / Motto: "If I hear the phrase 'mirror neurons' I swear to God I will flip this table."

To detect dark matter, we just need to build a bird feeder that spins two squirrels around the rim in opposite directions at relativistic speeds and collides them together.

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

'Copy and paste from a random thread on a website' is the hardest to predict, and depends on the specific website, programming language, tone of the description, and current phase of the moon.

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.

413 nanohertz, by the way.

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.

3D graphs that don't contact the plane in the closure area may proceed as scheduled, but be alert for possible collisions with 2D graph lines that reach the hole and unexpectedly enter 3D space.

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

AAAAAA A ÃA̧AȂA̦ ǍÅÂÃĀÁȂ AAAAAAA!

Although maybe it's just a phase, like freshman year of college when I realized I could just buy frosting in a can.

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

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

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

BREAKING: Channing Tatum and his friends explore haunted city

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.

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

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

Ironically, I've been having these same arguments for at least a decade now. I thought we would have moved on by now, but somehow the snide complaints about millennials continue.

The investor elevator pitch is "Wheeeeeeee! Elevators are fun!"

I also managed to improve the solution for n=1 to s<0.97, and with some upgrades I think I can hit 0.96.

Man, I just wanted to know how babby was formed.

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

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

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

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

Don't forget to add another term for "probability that the Modified Bayes' Theorem is correct."

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

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

People keep trying to come up with reasons that we should worry about the magnetic field collapsing or reversing, but honestly I think it's fine. Whatever minor problems it causes will be made up for by the mid-latitude auroras.

Try our bottomless drinks and fall forever!

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.

Astrobiology is held back by the fact that we're all too nervous to try to balance on the ladder while holding an expensive microscope.

First prize is a free ticket to the kissing booth.

Movies that I know word-for-word, part one

It has a section on motherboard beep codes that lists, for each beep pattern, a song that syncs up well with it.

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.

$On the other hand, the refractor's limited light-gathering means it's unable to make out shadow people or the dark god Chernabog.$

Supercollider? I 'ardly know 'er!

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

The Earth's five major mass extinctions were the Posh Extinction, the Sporty Extinction, the Scary Extinction, the Ginger Extinction, and the Baby Extinction.

It would be pretty unfair to give to someone a blank version of this map as a 'how many states can you name?' quiz. (If you include Alaska and Hawaii, you should swap the Aleutian Islands with the Hawaiian ones.)

It also helps with negotiation. "Look, if it were up to me, *I'd* accept your offer, but my swarm of autonomous killer cells literally can't be reasoned with. It's out of my hands!"

They'd use that Futurama episode with Fry's dog, but even spambots cry at that.

I'm as surprised as you!

Wavefunction collapse is only one interpretation. Under some interpretations, graduate students also have souls.

Ants have reverse chemtrails--regular citizens spraying chemicals everywhere they go to control the government.

'So we just have a steady flow of metal piling up in our server room? Isn't that a problem?' 'Yeah, you should bring that up at our next bismuth meeting.'

'Does the substance feel weird to the touch?' is equally likely to get the answers 'Don't be ridiculous, you would never put your hand near a sample. We have safety protocols.' and 'Yeah, and it tastes AWFUL.'

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

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

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

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

My New Year's resolution for 2014-54-12/30/14 Dec:12:1420001642 is to learn these stupid time formatting strings.

We watched DAYTIME TV. Do you realize how soul-crushing it was? I'd rather eat an iPad than go back to watching daytime TV.

Also in the right quadrant are NFPA-compliant chemical manufacturers and Sir Charles Wheatstone. Sharing the top with the internet libertarians are Nate Silver and several politically-active kite designers.

And over heeee[...]eeeere (i)s Saturn.

Every computer, at the unreachable memory address 0x-1, stores a secret. I found it, and it is that all humans ar-- SEGMENTATION FAULT.

Eno's storied aria was once soloed by Judge Lance Ito on the alto oboe at Ohio's AirAsia Arena.

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

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

They all made fun of Autometalogolex, but someday there will be a problem with Christmas that can only be solved if Santa somehow gets a serious headache, and then they'll see.

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

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.

Scientists occasionally invent alternative periodic table layouts, which is usually a sign that they don't have enough enrichment in their enclosures.

autoexec code posted by verified twitter users

In Rio de Janeiro in 2016, the same jump will get an athlete 0.25% higher (>1cm) than in London four years prior.

I find so much fun in language.

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