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

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

* Mad about jorts

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.

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

'Now, minions, I'm off to inspect our shark cages.' 'Do you really need to inspect them this often?' 'PRISONERS MUST NEVER ESCAPE.'

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

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

LOOK, THE LATENCY FALLS EVERY TIME YOU CLAP YOUR HANDS AND SAY YOU BELIEVE

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

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

I just want to give him a hug or something.

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

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

Curdled milk, of a peculiar kind, made after a Bulgarian recipe and called "yaghurt," is now a Parisian fad and is believed to be a remedy against growing old. A correspondent who has tried it, says he would prefer to die young. (1905, The Elk Falls Journal)

If all else fails, use "significant at a p>0.05 level" and hope no one notices.

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

"We can do 0.33 or 0.34, but our payroll software doesn't allow us to--" "NO DEAL."

I've got the Craigslist post ready to go! I wasn't sure what category it should go in, so I listed it as property and put that it has 'good sun exposure.'

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

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

If there's no dome, how do you explain the irregularities the board discovered in the zoning permits issued in that area!?

Under three ounces, but it stains panties.

Gotten the Ferris wheel operator's attention

I think about self-reference a lot. Example: this comment.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ok, plan B: Fly a kite into the blades, with a rock in a sling dangling below it, and create the world's largest trebuchet.

[title-text similarly alphabetized]

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

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

Gonna start bugging the Unicode consortium to add snake segment characters that can be combined into an arbitrary-length non-breaking snake.

Hopefully the HVAC people set it to only affect the AIR in the room.

For years, I took the wrong lesson from that Monster Cable experiment and only listened to my music through alligator-clipped coat hangers.

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

So I'm a bad person.

It's actually worst in people who study the Dunning–Kruger effect. We tried to organize a conference on it, but the only people who would agree to give the keynote were random undergrads.

'Arrest me, I'm a skateboarder' is an even more obnoxious variant.

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

To be fair, my job at NASA was working on robots and didn't actually involve any orbital mechanics. The small positive slope over that period is because it turns out that if you hang around at NASA, you get in a lot of conversations about space.

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

[10 years later] Man, why are people so comfortable handing Google and Facebook control over our nuclear weapons?

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.

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

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

I'm as surprised as you! I didn't think it was possible.

It's like someone briefly joined the team running the universe, introduced their idea for a cool mechanic, then left, and now everyone is stuck pretending that this wildly unbalanced dynamic makes sense.

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.

Every weekend I take an ATV out into the desert and spend a day tracing a faint "(C) GOOGLE 2009" watermark across the landscape.

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

Blockchains are like grappling hooks, in that it's extremely cool when you encounter a problem for which they're the right solution, but it happens way too rarely in real life.

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

Things were better before the Structuring and the Levels.

To compensate for this, I plan to spend 2013 doing nothing but talking about Mayans. My relationships with my friends and family may not fare well.

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

"Want to feel old?" "Yes."

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

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

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

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

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

Thanks for bringing us along.

Dear Wiccan readers: I understand modern Wiccans are not usually all about the curses and hexes. But Darth Vader was recently converted from Episcopalianism and he's still figuring it all out.

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

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.

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

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

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

Platonic solids for my real friends and real solids for my platonic friends!

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.

Well, there's one right here at the bottom, where it says "53."

You think, 'okay, THIS is an ideal use case for hardlinks!' but then 6 months later you're doing some extremely cursed Google search like 'javascript ext4' and wondering where things went wrong.

The Greeks long suspected this, but it wasn't until April 12th of 1882 that Ferdinand von Lindemann conclusively proved it when he constructed himself the most awesome birthday party possible and nobody showed up.

Force-choking the chicken.

I'm rubber. You're rubber. We contemplate the reality of our existence in mute, vulcanized horror.

If you ever hear "Wait, is that Kim Dotcom's new project? I'm really excited about it and already signed up, although I'm a little nervous about whether everyone should hand over control of their medical...", it's time to dig a bunker in your backyard.

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

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.

I was just disassembling it over the course of five hours so it would fit in the trash more efficiently.

I used to do this all the time.

New research shows over 60% of the financial collapse's toxic assets were created by power drills.

They managed to briefly hit the top of the rankings when they rejected everyone except one applicant, published 5 billion research papers that just said "Hi," and hired one of their graduates for $50 trillion/year (then fired them after 10 microseconds.)

The Gordian knot is an omniknot tied using every bend in the Ashley Book of Knots, and then for extra security the upper rope at every crossing is connected to the lower with a randomly-chosen hitch.

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.'

Speed Limit: 45 MPH / Minimum: 65 MPH

I mean, I can barely hear myself complaining about Battlestar Galactica.

'Why don't you just point it at their eye directly?' 'What is this, 2007?'

Also, I apologize for the time I climbed down into your world and everyone freaked out about the lesbian orgy overseen by a priest.

Bad flu epidemics can hit young adults hardest because they provoke their powerful immune systems into overreaction, so to stay healthy spend the next few weeks drunk and sleep-deprived to keep yours suppressed.

I should make a list of all the things I could be trying to optimize, prioritized by ... well, I guess there are a few different variables I could use. I'll create a spreadsheet ...

Sounds fine. I looked up the Academy, and it says on their MySpace page that their journal is peer-viewed and downloaded biannually.

Oh sure, I know Keira Knightly, from the first movie in that series by The Land Before Time producer. You know, the franchise with the guy from Jurassic Park and Ghostwriter, and script work by Billie Lourd's mom?

Anyway, we should totally go watch a video story or put some food in our normal mouths!

And a different ghost has replaced me in the bedroom.

After my absent-mindedness resulted in a bad posterboard-related stomachache, I learned to do the sign-making place last.

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

I know the etiquette is controversial, but I think it's rude when the person in front of me reclines their seat into the bell of my trumpet.

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

They have a telescope pointed RIGHT AT US!

There's a heated debate over whether the big island of Tierra del Fuego should qualify for membership.

I do this constantly

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

That eggplant is in something of a flaccid state.

Terms I'm going to start using: The Large Dipper, great potatoes, the Big Hadron Collider, and Large Orphan Annie.

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

Who's calling me?? WHY IS THE WORST PERSON IN THE WORLD CALLING ME!?

The TI-86 was bad enough. I don't know how I'd have gotten through high school if I'd had a laptop+wifi.

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'.

"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 rare compound solar-lunar-nephelogical eclipse

I pray GunPistolMan never learns the word 'sheeple'.

"I've always wanted to run naked through town, but I don't want to get in trouble with the king or be remembered by history as a weirdo. I wonder how I could ... EUREKA!"

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

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.

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

This message brought to you by the Society of Astronomers Trapped on the Surface of a Sphere.

Oh no, my marshmallow became tidally locked!

I'm as surprised as you!

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

After the test, she said that if she had a choice, she wouldn’t defend herself against drones using a tennis ball and racket, though she would absolutely pick them over other sports equipment. But, she added, "Drones don't bother me."

Opening dialogue by Scott

I don't think the Lakeshore Air Crash Museum really belongs under 'Tourist Attractions.' It's not a museum--it's just an area near the Lake Festival Laser Show where a lot of planes have crashed.

Knuth Paper-Stack Notation: Write down the number on pages. Stack them. If the stack is too tall to fit in the room, write down the number of pages it would take to write down the number. THAT number won't fit in the room? Repeat. When a stack fits, write the number of iterations on a card. Pin it to the stack.

The inflection point was probably in late 1966 or 1967, so when Neil Armstrong flew to space on Gemini 8, plate tectonics was not widely accepted, but when he landed on the Moon three years later it was the mainstream consensus.

My theory predicts that, at high enough energies, FRBs and perytons become indistinguishable because the detector burns out.

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

I've lived in the present for my whole life and I'm not about to move now.

If I were trapped on a desert island, and could have an unlimited supply of any one type of apple, I'd be like, "How did this situation happen?"

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

I can't wait until this is all over and I can go back to riding my horse through the mall.

It was great until my thumb slipped and I accidentally launched my telescope into the air at Mach 8.

But Einstein said it was the most powerful force in the universe, and I take all my investment advice from flippant remarks by theoretical physicists making small talk at parties.

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

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

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

At the boundary between each zone, stories blend together. Somewhere in the New Mexico desert, the Roadrunner is pursued by a tireless Anton Chigurh.

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

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

'List of helicopter prison escapes' and 'List of sexually active popes' are both entertainingly long, but sadly there's no 'List of helicopter prison escapes involving sexually active popes.'

If you're turning 27 and were born in the Northeast, maybe you were conceived in the April blizzard of 1982. Imagine: snowed in, candles, massage oil, your mom sporting nothing but her early 80's haircut and a smile ... aren't you glad you read the title-text?

Due to a typo, I initially found a forum for serious Fleshlight enthusiasts, and it turns out their highest-end models are ALSO capable of setting trees on fire. They're impossible to use without severe burns, but some of them swear it's worth it.

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

I actually remember being entertained by both the sequels while in the theater. They just don't hold up nearly as well in later comparison.

The ideal mix for maximum competitive cable-coiling energy is one A/V tech, one rock climber, one sailor, and one topologist.

These rocks are from a time before eyes, brains, and bones, pieces of a land warmed by an unseen sun.

I can't believe they wouldn't even let me hold a vote among the passengers about whether to try the loop.

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

The BBC lead was 'The elusive erogenous zone said to exist in some women may be a myth, say researchers who have hunted for it.' I couldn't read it with a straight face.

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

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

It's *almost* enough to make me want to redo high school.

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.

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

Did you know sociologists can't explain why people keep repeating that urban legend about bumblebees not being able to fly!?

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

Plus they take like 9%.

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

'Upgrade to the latest version of Adobe Flash player to view THIS content, bitch.' ::triggers detonator::

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

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

The arbiter gave my knight a red card for capturing with cleats up :(

Researchers just found the gene responsible for mistakenly thinking we've found the gene for specific things. It's the region between the start and the end of every chromosome, plus a few segments in our mitochondria.

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

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

Sharks can occasionally travel short distances through air when pursuing prey, but their attenuation coefficient is pretty high.

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

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

I woke up to find that I had scrawled the last line of this sleepily on a sheet of paper on my desk. I shouldn't have listened to the 70's hit marathon on the way home from work the night before.

Use your mouse or fingers to pan + zoom. To edit the map, submit your ballot on November 6th.

If you identified with the kids from The Breakfast Club when it came out, you're now much closer to the age of Principal Vernon.

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

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

Oh right, eye contact. Ok, good, holding the eye contact ... holding ... still holding ... ok, too long! Getting weird! Quick, look thoughtfully into space and nod. Oh, dammit, said 'yeah' again!

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.]

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

According to River, 'adequate' vacuuming systems drain the human body at about half a liter per second.

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

When Pope Gregory XIII briefly shortened the light-year in 1582, it led to navigational chaos and the loss of several Papal starships.

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

The thrower started hitting the bats too much, so the king of the game told him to leave and brought out another thrower from thrower jail.

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

I'm sorry, but the author of this Facebook comment clearly believes you were.

Easier to escape: n-layered nested quotes or an iron maiden?

There are two rules on this ship: Never gaze back into the projection abyss, and never touch the red button labeled DYMAXION.

A comic by my brother Doug, redrawn and rewritten by me

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

Theoretical physicist: At the Planck length, uncountably many.

There's a red convertible outside my building with the license plate 'DADS MNY'.

It started as a mistake that everyone was afraid to admit to, and then it stuck because removing it 'looks silly.'.

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

I hope we can stop them

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

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

Yes, it took a lot of work to make the cards and pieces, but it's worth it--the players are way more thorough than the tax prep people ever were.

Our new video ad campaign has our product's name shouted in the first 500 milliseconds, so we can reach the people in adjacent rooms while the viewer is still turning down the volume.

The best wedge issue is an actual wedge.

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

Theory: Smugness is proportional to the negative second derivative of TV ownership rate with respect to time.

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

I also enjoy Reverse Regular Golf. I've been playing for years all across the country and I'm still on the first hole.

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

They say if a mathematician doesn't do their great work by age eleven, they never will.

If you got a big keyspace, let me search it.

And I even got out my adorable new netbook!

Don't we all.

The henchmen Bebop and Rocksteady have hijacked the musical genres for us just like the Lone Ranger hijacked the William Tell Overture for our parents.

It's easier to be an asshole to words than to people.

If you ever see someone using a capital xi in an equation, just observe them quietly to learn as much as you can before they return to their home planet.

(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]

Could be worse. In some towns north of here, it's already December, and the 21st will last for nearly a week.

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

Hobby: seeing how many menu selections you can get someone to go through before they realize you're not an automated system and/or hang up.

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

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

It's pi plus C, of course.

Welcome to the Linguistics Department - It has been [2] [DAYS] since someone noticed that the Biology Department sign has a one-day-long singular/plural disagreement after it resets.

You didn't run a chemical analysis against the Shroud of Turin? Man, all that work for NOTHING.

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

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).

ThisadpaidforbythecounciltopromoteMicrosoftandChristianity. Remember, The Bible is Closed Source.

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

Not even metapneumovirus, easily the common cold virus with the coolest name, warrants our sympathy. Colds suck. No mercy.

Trivia: Roger Daltry originally wrote 'Don't try an' Digg what we all say' but erased the second 'g' when he moved to reddit.

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

'It's not actually ... it's a DEVICE for EXPLORING a PLAUSIBLE REALITY that's not the one we're in, to gain a broader understanding about it.' 'oh, like a boat!' '...' 'Just for the sake of argument, we should get a boat! You can invite the Devil, too, if you want.'

It does come at the small cost of a LOT more off-by-40-or-50 errors.

Lambda calculus? More like SHAMbda calculus, amirite?

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

'All time machine systems nominal ... T-minus ten ... eleven ...'

If my country ever picks a new national flag, this is on my shortlist for designs to argue for, but I think in the end I'll go with the green puzzle piece or broken image thumbnail.

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

Unfortunately, KM3NeT led to the discovery of the Pauli anglerfish, which emits Cherenkov radiation to prey on neutrino researchers.

NASA prefers to say that their rovers are 'looking for signs of past life on Mars' and not 'ghost hunting.'

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.

There are some papers arguing that there's a volcanic component, but I personally think they're just feeling guilty and trying to cover the trail.

We have met the enemy and he is us.

I recently had someone ask me to go get a computer and turn it on so I could restart it. He refused to move further in the script until I said I had done that.

And they both react poorly to showers.

The only things you HAVE to know are how to make enough of a living to stay alive and how to get your taxes done. All the fun parts of life are optional.

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.)

YOU THINK THIS IS FUNNY?

Next time I go, I'm going to prepare a whole bunch of opinions that I'm sure are good, and make everyone sit quietly while I run through them.

If you're not cool enough to do it manually, you can look up tools like Upside-Down-Ternet for playing games with people on your wifi.

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

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

I'm reading a goddamn book, thank you very much.

I'm actually not sure if Vader and the Emperor count as a household or if Vader lives in that weird black egg thing or what.

Other high scorers are melt-in-your-hand aluminum-destroying gallium and tritium-powered glowsticks. Lawn darts are toward the other end.

For the IPv6 map just imagine the XP default desktop picture.

Life goal #29 is to get enough of them rejected that I can publish a comparative analysis of the rejection letters.

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

Frankly, given their extreme gravitational fields and general instability, even 12-inch globes should probably be banned.

And then a second one, to drain the sea.

As my standard, I use going to sleep at midnight and waking up at 8 AM.

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

The best hugs are probably from hagfish, which can extrude microscopic filaments that convert a huge volume of water around them to slime in seconds. Instant cozy blanket!

Cloud computing has a ways to go.

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

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

And the worst part is you won't apologize.

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

It's hard to decide which simple machine system to invest in. DeWalt makes a great lever and inclined plane, but I hear Milwaukee's wheel-and-axles are really good.

I liked the idea, suggested by h00k on bash.org, of a Twitter bot that messages prominent politicians to tell them when they've unnecessarily used sms-speak abbreviations despite having plenty of characters left.

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

Mars does get a good score on 'noise levels' and 'scenic views,' but the school district ranking isn't great; the only teacher--the Perseverance rover--is too busy with rock samples to teach more than the occasional weekend class.

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

I'm going to drive this Netherlands joke so far into the ground they'll have to build levees around it to keep the sea out.

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 offered to make me a green beret, but I liked my regular one. Although it gets kind of squashed under my helmet.

Evolutionarily speaking, mushrooms are technically a type of ghost.

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

Lucky. In MY dream, all the people who grew up loving The Giving Tree paired up with all the students who had weird dreams after reading The Metamorphosis. That one was more confusing.

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

Low gravity can cause bone loss, so we're pleased to report that, since we initiated capsule motion, the number of bones in each crew member has been steadily increasing.

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

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

Are you ok? Do you need help?

::PLOOOOSH:: Looks like you won't be making it to Vinland today, Leaf Erikson.

I bet she gets you to mow the lawn, doesn't she?

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

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

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

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

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

It can be expensive to hire a professional spectroscopist for your wedding, but the quality of the spectra you get is worth it.

It's a myth that you can never cross mountains safely, but be sure you understand how the climatic situation there will affect your parent thunderstorm.

'If you've eliminated a few possibilities and you can't think of any others, your weird theory is proven right' isn't quite as rhetorically compelling.

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.

November marks the birthday of Charles Schulz, pioneer of tongue awareness.

Astronomers are a little unsure of the applicability of this index, but NASA's Planetary Protection Officer is all in favor.

Unfortunately, my scheme to trick NASA has now taken over a decade longer than planned and has run way over budget.

The new crowd is heavily shaped by this guy named Eric, who's basically the Paris Hilton of the amateur plastic crazy straw design world.

'No idea what I was thinking! Haha! But anyway, maybe we should check out what this Ba'al guy has to say.'

Let me just scroll down and check behind that rock. Annnnd ... nope, page copyright year starts with '19'. Oh God, is this a WEBRING?

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.

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

Luckily, unlike in our previous study, we have no reason to believe Evangeline the Adulterator gained access to our stored doses.

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.

True story: I had to try several times to upload this comic because my ssh key was blacklisted.

I'm not totally locked into my routine—twice a year, I take a break to change the batteries in my smoke detectors.

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

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!)

Of course you get an ice cream cone for the swimmer too! You're not a monster.

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

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

It's my most ambitious project yet, judging by the amount of guacamole.

The 'controlled demolition' theory was concocted by the government to distract us. '9/11 was an inside job' was an inside job!

'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.'

It's possible the bread and shell can be split into a top and bottom flavor, and some models additionally suggest Strange Bread and Charm Shells.

Yes, the cosmic microwave background is great, but what about the earthly microwave foreground?

I'll concede ergonomics anecdotally, but none of the studies of Dvorak were at all rigorous (the most-cited Navy study was overseen by Dvorak himself). And the 'slow typists down' thing is a myth. Also EMACS RULES VI DROOLS WOOOOOOO!

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

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.

This project actually inspired a two-hour powerpoint presentation that Al Gore gave around the country.

I mean, it's been almost twenty years. Now, it's possible you're simply embedding Windows directory paths in your URIs, but in that case you need more than just a short lecture.

Call me, MAYBE.

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

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

Calling a cab means cutting into beer money.

'ARE YOU TURNED ON YET?' 'I DON'T THINK SO--ARE YOU?' 'MAYBE A LITTLE!' 'OK, FIVE MORE MINUTES.'

Communication is one of the most popular ways to transmit information, ahead of rivals such as

For a long time, people thought maybe Usain Bolt was the one for running, until the 2090s and the incredible dominance of Derek Legs.

"Oh, and our computers all have cameras now, which is nice during the pandemic lockdowns." "The WHAT."

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

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

He holds the laptop like that on purpose, to make you cringe.

I always hate dragging around the larger archipelagos, but I appreciate how the Scandinavian peninsula flexes outward to create a snug pocket for Britain and Ireland.

In-universe, Bart Simpson and Harry Potter were the same age in 1990. Bart is perpetually 10 years old because of a spell put on his town by someone trying to keep him from getting his Hogwarts letter.

If at least one person has a nightmare about being swarmed by hundreds of mouse-sized dromaeosaurids, my work will have been done.

No more, no less

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

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

The number one rule of string manipulation is that youâ€™ve got to specify your encodings.

Want to feel old? Wait.

A human is a system for converting dust billions of years ago into dust billions of years from now via a roundabout process which involves checking email a lot.

In a way, all vultures are Time Vultures; some just have more patience than others.

One of the survivors, poking around in the ruins with the point of a spear, uncovers a singed photo of Richard Stallman. They stare in silence. "This," one of them finally says, "This is a man who BELIEVED in something."

There's Livejournal drama between those who want to wear human suits over fursuits and those who just take off the fursuits.

100he100k out th1s 1nno5at4e str1ng en100o501ng 15e been 500e5e50op1ng! 1t's 6rtua100y perfe100t! ...hang on, what's a "virtuacy"?

'The Return of the Boomerang' would make a great movie title.

I mean, it's pretty, but it doesn't really affect us beyond that. Except that half the nights aren't really dark, and once or twice a day it makes the oceans flood the coasts.

Computer viruses currently fall somewhere between prions and fire.

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

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

[Shortly thereafter, at a nearby bakery] ::CRASH:: ::RUMBLE:: ::VRRRRRR:: '... I don't know, officer. It just scooped up an entire rack of scones and drove away!'

You can look at practically any part of anything manmade around you and think 'some engineer was frustrated while designing this.' It's a little human connection.

It's early 2020. The entire country is gripped with Marco Rubio fever except for Alaska, which is freaking out. You're frantically studying up on etiquette and/or sexting.

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!

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

The Doppler effect is a mysterious wavelength-shifting phenomenon which seems to primarily affect sirens, which is why the 🚨 emoji is red.

Except in reality crossing a stream of marshmallows would create a giant Bill Murray.

HACK THE STARS

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

"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.

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.

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

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

My theory is that most humans have been colonized with alien mind-control slugs that hold the earbuds for them, and the ones who can't wear earbuds are the only surviving free ones.

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

Using a classic Timothy Zahn EU/Legends novel is bad enough, but at least the style and setting aren't too far off. If you really want to mess with people, try using Splinter of the Mind's Eye.

I want to sell apples but I'm still working on getting the machine to do the cutting and grafting.

The way out is to use the marker you have to add a box that says 'get a marker' to the line between you and 'start', then add a 'no' line from the trap box to 'end'.

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.

Guest comic by Jeph Jacques of Questionable Content, whose internal monologue hasn't been speaking to him for the past three years.

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

Hypothermia of below 98.6 K should be treated by leaving the giant molecular cloud and moving to the vicinity of a star.

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

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

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

Sci-fi has energy weapons because otherwise the people like me who watch it get distracted counting shots.

Will there ever be a physics term greater than 'tachyonic antitelephone?' According to this message from the future, the answer is 'no.'

At least if you're really into, like, Turkish archaeology, store clerks aren't like 'hey, how 'bout those Derinkuyu underground cities!' when they're trying to be polite.

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

Verbiage. Va-jay-jay. Irregardless.

The cola+Mentos trick is up there with corn starch+water (vibrating platter optional) in scientific coolness out of common kitchen supplies.

I wonder how hard it would be to ride an electric scooter in a hamster ball.

Some engineer out there has solved P=NP and it's locked up in an electric eggbeater calibration routine. For every 0x5f375a86 we learn about, there are thousands we never see.

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

Sure, this exoplanet we discovered may seem hostile to life, but our calculations suggest it's actually in the accretion disc's habitable zone.

[later] I don't get why our pizza slices have such terrible reviews; the geotextile-infused sauce gives the toppings incredible slope stability!

Backward-compatible with many existing cables, and can connect directly to phones or tablets if you press them down hard enough.

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'.

The universe is probably littered with the one-planet graves of cultures which made the sensible economic decision that there's no good reason to go into space--each discovered, studied, and remembered by the ones who made the irrational decision.

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

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

Recently, some exoplanet astronomers have managed to use careful analysis of reflected light to discover Earth during the day.

A whirlpool!

So he's saying that God thought Hitler's art was so bad that the Holocaust was an acceptable alternative. It's no secret that the hat guy is closely based on Aram, from Men in Hats.

But still, my scheme for creating and saving user config files and data locally to preserve them across reinstalls might be useful for--wait, that's cookies.

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

After somewhere around 40 hours, there's no academic reason to go to the class. Only go for the hallucinations.