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

Einstein's theories solved a longstanding mystery about Mercury: Why it gets so hot. "It's because," he pointed out, "the sun is right there."

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!

I came here to chew bubblegum and say no more than eighteen words ... and I'm all out of

Unsafe vehicles, hills, and philosophy go hand in hand.

After a lot of analysis, I've determined that they're actually big red dots; they're just very far away.

ERROR: We've reached an unreachable state. Anything is possible. The limits were in our heads all along. Follow your dreams.

90% of the iceberg is hidden beneath the water, but that 90% only uses 10% of its brain, so it's really only 9%.

Scientists are also sexy, let's not forget that.

'How about a little ... *family growth*?' 'Dude, that's not until round two.'

Disclaimer: I have not actually tried the beta yet. I hear it's quite pleasant and hardly Hitler-y at all.

Just pretend you're kidding.

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.

We've gotten him up to 20% milk and cookies through an aggressive public campaign, but that seems to be his dietary limit. Anything above that and he starts developing nutritional deficiencies.

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

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

If you have any ideas, I hear you can send them to iaupublic@iap.fr.

Someone get that Pachelbel's Canon kid a recording contract, stat.

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

Unless the CS students finish the robot revolution before you finish the cephalopod one.

You can also try 'Yikes.'

"Measure zero times, cut zero times." --carpenter who has achieved enlightenment and realized the wood is fine where it is

'Finding a 105-year-old who's lived in each location and asking them which hurricane they think was the worst' is left as an exercise for the reader.

Focus of your research: EXTREME PETTINESS AND UNWILLINGNESS TO LET ANYTHING GO

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

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

'There's also a spike on the Fourier transform at the one-month mark where --' 'You want to stop talking right now.'

Maybe encouraging the publication of null results isn't enough--maybe we need a journal devoted to publishing results the study authors find personally annoying.

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

At least we can all agree on the enormity of this usage.

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

Or that I'm at least following the curve of the Earth around to land ...

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

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

[moments later, checking phone] Okay, I agree my posting it was weird, but it's somehow even more unnerving that you immediately liked the post.

A long, long time (plus 40 years) ago, in a galaxy far, far away (plus a corrective factor involving the Hubble constant) ...

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

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.

We're getting a lot of complaints from commuters who were routed onto a coaster, but the theme park patrons who spent hours stuck on an intercity line are also not happy.

Most properties can only boast INDOOR heated floors.

Refs generally say that you can exercise enough altitude control to avoid the ground, but if you start strategically choosing air layers to steer yourself, that's traveling.

Hard to believe that for so many years once they were fully extended we just let them tip over.

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

Their crash investigation team had some particularly harsh words for Dave Matthews.

*click* Let him know he's got a stain on his shirt, though.

People go to the website because they can't wait for the next alumni magazine, right? What do you mean, you want a campus map? One of our students made one as a CS class project back in '01! You can click to zoom and everything!

I just came from The Martian, and I just have to say: Forget BB-8; I want a pet Sojourner! It's always been the cutest of our Mars rovers.

Sure, T. rex is closer in height to Stegosaurus than a sparrow. But that doesn't tell you much; 'Dinosaur Comics' author Ryan North is closer in height to certain dinosaurs than to the average human.

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

As the editor has reportedly defeated Death in a series of games of skill, no further obituaries are expected.

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

While it may seem like trivia, it (causes huge headaches for software developers / is taken advantage of by high-speed traders / triggered the 2003 Northeast Blackout / has to be corrected for by GPS satellites / is now recognized as a major cause of World War I).

I firmly believe that nothing can go wrong on a project if you're wearing one of those wrist things.

Surrounded by boring mysteries.

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

My friend Finn tried to mail one end of the cable to me and thread the mail system.

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

Due to their proximity across the channel, there's long been tension between North Korea and the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Southern Ireland.

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

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!

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

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

We're firing you, but the online headline-writing division wants to hire you.

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

The problem with learning about biology is that everyone you meet is it.

I think I accidentally installed an Overton window in my bedroom. A few months ago, the sun wasn't in my face in the morning, but now it is.

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

Abel and Steve would've been fine! I like Steve!

$GENERAL JAN DODONNA: An analysis of the plans provided by Princess Leia has reinvigorated the arguments of the 'artificial moonlet' and 'rogue planet-station' camps. I fear this question is fracturing the Rebellion.$

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.

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

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.

There's also a +1 sometimes, which is there to keep everyone on their toes. In the future, people who got to pick cool numbers by signing up for Google Voice early will be revered as wizards.

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

... okay, but because you said that, we're breaking up.

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

Chomskyists, generative linguists, and Ryan North, your days are numbered.

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.

"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.

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

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

Prediction for Carlsen v. Anand: ... 25. Qb8+ Nxb8 26. Rd8# f6 27. "... dude." Qf5 28. "The game is over, dude." Qxg5 29. Rxe8 0-1 30. "Dude, your move can't be '0-1'. Don't write that down." [Black flips board]

Ingress: Foursquare With Space Noises.

And I can't believe some places still use fax machines. The electrical signals waste so much time going AROUND the Earth when neutrino beams can go straight through!

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

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

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.

I'm not sure if this is actually true

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

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

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

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.

Just think of all the countless petty squabbles and misunderstandings, of all the fervent hatreds, over so insignificant a thing as the direction and duration of a rocket engine firing.

You absolute-fucking-... shit.

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

Really, the comforting side in most conspiracy theory arguments is the one claiming that anyone who's in power has any plan at all.

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

There's a compromise bill to keep the notification bar but at least charge the battery.

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

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

I still wish it were true.

Still waiting for the Pokémon Go update that lets you capture strangers' pets.

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

A term coined by my friend Beth

The theory finally unifies cosmic inflation and regular inflation.

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

I'm as surprised as you!

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

If only my ancestors had been fortunate enough to marry into the branch of the bacteria family that could photosynthesize, like all my little green cousins here.

"Ok, team. We have a little under 10,000 years before closest approach to figure out how to destroy Barnard's Star." "Why, does it pose a threat to the Solar System?" "No. It's just an asshole."

Cloud computing has a ways to go.

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

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

An occasional source of mild Thanksgiving tension in my family is that my mother is a die-hard fan of The Core (2003), and various family members sometimes have differing levels of enthusiasm for her annual tradition of watching it.

The safe is empty except for an unsolved 5x5 Rubik's cube.

On the plus side, we definitely killed that cancer over there, even if we caused a bunch more everywhere else.

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

The projection's north pole is in a small lake on the island of Mahé in the Seychelles, which is off the top of the map and larger than the rest of the Earth's land area combined.

That eggplant is in something of a flaccid state.

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

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

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

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

Maybe I should've tried Wexler?

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

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

Both too cautious AND not cautious enough: "I'm skeptical that those are aliens, so I'm going to try pulling off their masks."

Mmmm, this is such a positive experience! I feel no social pressure to enjoy it at all!

The Hertzsprung-Russell diagram is located in its own lower right corner, unless you're viewing it on an unusually big screen.

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.

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.]

It's nice how the end of the periodic table is flush with the edge these days, so I think we should agree no one should find any new elements after #118 unless they discover a whole row at once.

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

Their biggest mistake was bringing Rachael Ray and Emeril to tour the lab and sign off on the project. That's when Spielberg caught wind of it.

If you think the purveyors of DRM simply want to protect artists, check out chapters 13 and 14 in Free Culture, by Lawrence Lessig. Their goal is the elimination of all culture they don't control.

They eventually resolved this self-reference, but Cantor's 'everything-in-the-fetish-book-twice' parties finally sunk the idea.

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

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

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

This was an actual mock conversation between me and a friend at TGiF. The waitress walked up around panel 5 and was somewhat put off.

Even the identity matrix doesn't work normally

If you're really savvy, you can hide an entire set of illicit transactions by timing them to draw what looks like a graph inset.

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

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

If you encounter a hex bolt, but you only brought screwdrivers, you can try sandwiching the head of the bolt between two parallel screwdriver shafts, squeezing the screwdrivers together with a hand at either end, then twisting. It doesn't work and it's a great way to hurt yourself, but you can try it!

Slowly progressing from 'how do protons behave in relativistic collisions?' to 'what the heck are protons even doing when they're just sitting there?'

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

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

Life hack: Wait for an advanced civilization to be briefly distracted, then sneak in and construct a slightly smaller Dyson sphere inside theirs.

Fun fact: if you say this every time a professor does something to a complex-number equation that drops the imaginary part, they'll eventually move the class to another room and tell everyone else except you.

I adopted a cat that weighs 12 solar masses. Laser pointers love chasing it.

In addition to eating foxes, rabbits can eat grass. The grass also eats foxes. Our equations chart the contours of Fox Hell.

"I [suspect] that we are throwing more and more of our resources, including the cream of our youth, into financial activities remote from the production of goods and services, into activities that generate high private rewards disproportionate to their social productivity. I suspect that the immense power of the computer is being harnessed to this 'paper economy', not to do the same transactions more economically but to balloon the quantity and variety of financial exchanges." --James Tobin, July 1984

Dot Tumblr Dot Com, on the other hand, would be an awful name for a band, if only because of how hard it would be to direct people to your band's website.

I never got around to seeing that movie about the battle (of Midway).

SEMI-PROTECT THE CONSTITUTION

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

Before you say anything, no, I know not to leave my computer sitting out logged in to all my accounts. I have it set up so after a few minutes of inactivity it automatically switches to my brother's.

'I don't know, why is your beret staying on your head?' 'Staples.'

'Oh yeah? Give me 50 milliscore reasons why I should stop.'

Protip: Annoy Ray Kurzweil by always referring to it as the 'Cybersingularity'.

It's commonly known that too much perspective can be a downer.

Maybe someday science will get over its giant collective crush on Richard Feynman. But I doubt it!

Birds are Aves, which is part of the clade Theropoda, which is in Saurischia, which is in Dinosauria. Those birds outside our windows are dinosaurs. We can clear out the rest of our brains because we now have the best fact.

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

Chuck Jones is a vengeful god.

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

(six hours later) ARGH. How are these stupid microchips so durable?! All I want is to undo a massive industrial process with household tools!

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

At least I never gave her the root password.

It's amazing what it does for YouTube comments.

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.

Originally, the ceremony used a variety of rodents and mustelids, but over time most people agreed it made sense to standardize on a specific individual ground squirrel in Pennsylvania.

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

Three headstones down, I got a call from my mom and it went from bad to worse.

Problem Exists Between Leopard And Chair

Since buns range from crepuscular to nocturnal, it's recommended that you enable the scheduled "Do Not Disturb" mode on your phone to avoid being woken by alerts about Night Buns.

You can evade blue shells in Double Dash, but it is deep magic.

Guest comic by Zach Weiner of Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal. When I was stressed out, Zach gave me a talk that was really encouraging and somehow involved nanobots.

But the past was much too cramped!

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

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

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

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

Also on the agenda: what's with his hips?

These pranks happen all the time. English doesn't allow one-syllable words to end in a lax vowel, so writers on The Simpsons decided to mess with future linguists by introducing the word "meh."

James Cameron's Terminator 3 was the REALLY prophetic one. That's why Skynet sent a robot back to the 1990s to prevent him from ever making it, ultimately handing the franchise over to other directors.

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

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

I hear in some places, you need one form of ID to buy a gun, but two to pay for it by check. It's interesting who has what incentives to care about what mistakes.

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

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

"So, like, sexy news videos?" "No, people have tried that--it's still just video content. We need to actually inform people THROUGH making out. I would call it 'Mouth Content,' but I think that's already the title of a Neil Cicierega album."

She's pretty sharp when provoked.

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

He probably just poops over the side of the sleigh.

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

This was my friend David's idea

These new Bluetooth socks are great, but it's troubling to learn that I average almost 14 hours of Shoe Time a day.

The installation of the pipes on the inside of the insulation can be challenging, especially when the neighbor could come home at any minute.

Under the 'has cleared its orbital neighborhood' and 'fuses hydrogen into helium' definitions, thanks to human activities Earth technically no longer qualifies as a planet but DOES count as a star.

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

Spellcheck has been great, but whoever figures out how to get grammar check to work is guaranteed a Nobel.

[other side] If the first word of an instruction you're given starts with the same letter as your crush's name, for that step imagine the experimenter is your crush.

'Yeah, that squid's a total asshole.' [scoot scoot]

U+FDD0 is actually Unicode for the eye of the basilisk, though for safety reasons no font actually renders it.

If you ask it to please turn off that feature, it apologizes a whole bunch and promises to try to be quieter, then switches to a slightly lower-volume version of the clip with "sorry!" after the louder sounds.

Update: Santa has been destroyed by the range safety officer.

The key is portion control, which is why I've switched to eating smaller cans of frosting instead of full bottles.

Starring Macaulay Culkin.

It may be a fundamentally empty experience, but holy crap the Droid's 265 ppi screen is amazing.

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

My pet theory is that in real life, the kid at the beginning of Jurassic Park who made fun of the 'six-foot turkey' never got a talking-to from Dr. Grant, and grew up to produce several of the movie's sequels.

Protip: At midnight your excuse for not having read The Great Gatsby can switch from "I'm worried about violating copyright" to "I think my copy requires Flash."

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

For the first time ever, the phrase 'I'd like to thank everyone at 4chan for making me successful and happy' is uttered.

Kids are genetic experiments. We're just experimenting responsibly!

It's definitely an intentional foul, but we've decided it's worth it.

'And then whisper 'anapest' in my ear as you hold me?'

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

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

Making out with yourself: now an official xkcd theme? Troubling.

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

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

Just make sure all your friends and family are out of the car, or that you've made backup friends and family at home.

20 balloons float away while I'm busy permanently tying one to a tree to deal with it for good. Unfortunately, that one balloon was 'land a rocket on the moon in Kerbal Space Program.'

And given how much of my stuff they go through, they definitely know where I live.

It's important to make sure your analysis destroys as much information as it produces.

I've looked at clouds from both sides now.

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

It may remain in equilibrium for some time, slowly growing, and then suddenly become significantly redder.

Did you base the saucer shape on pop culture depictions of aliens, or was that stuff based on your ships? Does the rotational symmetry help with ... hey, where are you going?

I will vote, no questions asked, for any candidate who describes themselves as 'more of a deficit sugar glider.'

Speed limit c arcminutes^2 per steradian

Staple guns: because duct tape can't make that 'kaCHUNK' noise.

Are you still there, server? It's me, Margaret.

If long tooltips / cut off for you / then upgrade from / Firefox 2 / Burma Shave

To that stranger on the KOOL Tree House chat room, I gotta hand it to you: You were, ultimately, not wrong.

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

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

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

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

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

Opening dialogue by Scott

It's hard living somewhere with antlions, because every time you find one of their traps, you feel compelled to spend all day constructing a tiny model of Jabba's sail barge next to it.

WARNING: PEOPLE NAMED EVE ARE PROHIBITED FROM INSTALLING THIS APP!

I've been working my way through this 1950s podcast by someone named John Tolkien called 'Lord of the Rings'--it's a deep dive into this fictional world he created. Good stuff, really bingeable!

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

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

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

Wait till they notice the faint reflection of Michael Jordan and Bugs Bunny in the E-mode.

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

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

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

And let's be honest, it's more like two and a half stars. Proxima is barely a star and barely bound to the system.

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.

The TempurPedic wineglass guy broke his ankle.

v3.0.2: Hey, if anyone still using this app is headed to the beach, can you stop at 4th and River St and grab the sunscreen from my car? Trunk should be unlocked. Thanks!

Pool on the roof must've sprung a leak.

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

There are actually lowercase-like 'oldstyle' forms of normal numbers with more pronounced ascenders and descenders, which is why some numbers like '5' in books sometimes dangle below the line. But the true capital numbers remain the domain of number maven Mavis Beacon.

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

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

Before resurfacing, they promise to inspect the ice for any evidence of hockey-playing life.

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

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

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

The real challenge is how to file Boba Fett's biography of Doris Kearns Goodwin.

FYI: If you get curious and start trying to calculate the time adjustment function that minimizes the gap between the most-used and least-used digit (for a representative sample of common cook times) without altering any time by more than 10%, and someone asks you what you're doing, it's easier to just lie.

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!

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

'Meet hot young singles in your mom's basement today'? Man, screw you, GeoIP.

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

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

Protip: Even without the red spiders, never have that conversation halfway through a balloon ride.

And yet I have no trouble believing that the start of the 2016 election was several decades ago.

I guess if she accepted irrational realities, she'd hardly be my fantasy.

That track ('Battle Without Honor or Humanity') -- like 'Ride of the Valkyries' -- improves *any* activity.

You know when you can't hear your speakers, and you keep turning various volume controls up higher and higher in confusion, and then someone hits the mute button and there's a deafening blast of sound? That's basically what happened at Chernobyl.

Remember to only adopt domesticated drones that specifically request it. It's illegal to collect wild ones under the Migratory Drone Treaty Act.

She's so fat the attraction goes up as the CUBE of the distance instead of the square

So what do we do when we get to base 10? Do we use A, B, C, etc? No: Numbers larger than about 3.6 million are simply illegal.

All electromagnetic equations: The same as all fluid dynamics equations, but with the 8 and 23 replaced with the permittivity and permeability of free space, respectively.

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

While there's no formal regulation, it turns out their industry group is NOT one you want mad at you.

The blueprints for the Department of the Internet offices call for Ceiling Cat-themed sprinkler heads.

I would describe my personal alignment as "lawful heterozygous silty liquid."

For a thousand generations we vowed never to forget how his soldiers feasted on our brother Stephen.

'TMI' he whispered, gazing into the sea.

If you've never had sex, this is what it feels like. Complete with the brief feeling of satisfaction, followed by ennui, followed by getting bored and trying to make it happen again.

This is also one of only five identified situations in which a vuvuzela is actually appropriate.

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

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

Even geology papers about Heart Mountain are like, "Look, we all agree this 'volcanic gas earthquake hovercraft' thing seems like it can't possibly be right, but..."

There are regularly placed bumps on the underside just the right size to press the rocker switch on the power strip.

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

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

Hang on, let me scare the live raccoon over to the same side as the dead one.

Their signature play is the three-point combinator, a recursive offense which is guaranteed not to halt and continues accumulating points until the buzzer.

There's a version that shows the planets with no cropping, but it's hard to find a display that supports it.

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

Not to be confused with Serious PuTTY, the Windows terminal client where everything is in Impact.

"Cumulative number of coronavirus spreadsheets created over time" is a spreadsheet I am coming dangerously close to creating.

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

This is roughly equivalent to 'number of times I've picked up a seashell at the ocean' / 'number of times I've picked up a seashell', which in my case is pretty close to 1, and gets much closer if we're considering only times I didn't put it to my ear.

I was eventually kicked out of my architectural engineering program because I wouldn't stop referring to HVAC as "the fandom."

[later] I can't believe how bad corruption has become, especially given that our league split off from the statewide one a month ago SPECIFICALLY to protest this kind of flagrantly biased judging.

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

With a space elevator, a backyard full of solar panels could launch about 500 horses per year, and a large power plant could launch 10 horses per minute.

Just thought you should know

'So how DID you go from working at the employment records office to becoming president of MIT and CEO of IBM?' 'I guess I just have an eye for opportunities.'

I'm normally a pretty frugal person, but I still compulsively buy any R/C aircraft that's less than $30. In the last few years, this has become a problem.

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

FOR AN INTRIGUING TIME CALL

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.

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

If you actually do this, what really happens is Douglas Hofstadter appears and talks to you for eight hours about strange loops.

They say you can't argue with results, but what kind of defeatist attitude is that? If you stick with it, you can argue with ANYTHING.

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.

The problem with Haskell is that it's a language built on lazy evaluation and nobody's actually called for it.

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

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

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

Okay, now just as the loss hits him, slam on the brakes.

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

Update: It turns out the cannon has a motorized base, and can make holes just fine using the barrel itself as a battering ram. But due to design constraints it won't work without a projectile loaded in, so we still need those drills.

Where I live, one of the most common categories of sky object without a weird obsessive spotting community is "lost birthday party balloons," so that might be a good choice—although you risk angering the marine wildlife people, and they have sharks.

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

Roundly-condemned headlinese initiative shuttered indefinitely.

People say setting of fireworks indoors is dangerous, but I looked at their energy release and it's like 10^-40 foe; totally negligible.

Maybe if I spin it back and forth really fast I can do some kind of pulse-width modulation.

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

Pythagorean means are nice and all, but throwing the median in the pot is really what turns this into random forest statistics: applying every function you can think of, and then gradually dropping the ones that make the result worse.

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

Hey, at least I ran out of staples.

Ontology is way off to the left and geography is way off to the right.

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

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

'Wait, our state has mail voting. The forms are literally on the kitchen table.' 'Not now, I'm busy researching which channels have sharks in them.'

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

These neutrinos were freshly produced by a local source just 8 minutes ago

WARNING: This item was aged by the same inexorable passage of time that also processes nuts.

Hang on, I just remembered another thing I'm right about. See...

And sometimes I use it to retaliate against the guy upstairs with the loud girlfriend and the elliptical dish.

The floor should be slightly curved, but we haven't figured out artificial gravity yet, so for now we just added a trace intoxicating gas to the air that messes with your inner ear and gives you a sense that the ground is tilting away from you.

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

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

Trivia: Elaine is actually her middle name.

I don't see why everyone is so hungry for BAD news, but fine, I'll give in to feedback and add a dark mode.

Maybe there's no tenderness in her fingertips either, but at least SHE puts out.

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

Some future reader, who may see the term, without knowing the history of it, may imagine that it had reference to some antiquated bridge of the immortal Poet, thrown across the silver Avon, to facilitate his escape after some marauding excursion in a neighbouring park; and in some Gentleman's Magazine of the next century, it is not impossible, but that future antiquaries may occupy page after page in discussing so interesting a matter. We think it right, therefore, to put it on record in the Oriental Herald that the 'Shakesperian Rope Bridges' are of much less classic origin; that Mr Colin Shakespear, who, besides his dignity as Postmaster, now signs himself 'Superintendent General of Shakesperian Rope Bridges', is a person of much less genius than the Bard of Avon. --The Oriental Herald, 1825

That night, retired USAF pilots covertly replaced the '62' with '50'.

Billboard's "Best of the 80s" chart includes Blondie's 1980 hit "Call Me." QED.

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

Googling inevitably reveals that my problem is caused by a known bug triggered by doing [the exact combination of things I want to do]. I can fix it, or wait a few years until I don't want that combination of things anymore, using the kitchen timer until then.

But then she does that thing with her tongue and I remember why I left you.

I wonder what percentage of not-obviously-busy people on the street would say yes to kite-flying with a stranger. This looks like a job for Science!

Household tip: Tired of buying so much toilet paper? Try unspooling the paper from the roll before using it. A single roll can last for multiple days that way, and it's much easier on your plumbing.

It ships with a version of Google Now that alerts you when it's too late to leave for your appointments.

They're continuing to search for a square with the same area as the circle, as efforts to construct one have run into difficulties.

June 21st, 365, the date of the big Mediterranean earthquake and tsunami, lived in infamy for a few centuries before fading. Maybe the trick is a catchy rhyme; the '5th of November' thing is still going strong over 400 years later.

Building Inspectors HATE This One Weird Trick

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.

If we get the doors open and plug up the dam on the Sirannon so the water rises a little, the pool will start draining into Moria. How do you think the Watcher would fare against a drenched Balrog?

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

Well, for some value of 'actually work'.

Magnetohydrodynamics combines the intuitive nature of Maxwell's equations with the easy solvability of the Navier-Stokes equations. It's so straightforward physicists add "relativistic" or "quantum" just to keep it from getting boring.

Hey, man, the 1670s called. They were like 'Wherefore this demonic inſtrument? By what ſorcery does it produce ſuch ſounds?"

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

The biggest jump is at 11:00am EST (4:00pm UTC) when midnight reaches the UTC+8 time zone. That time zone, which includes China, is home to a quarter of the world's population. India and Sri Lanka (UTC+5:30) put us over the 50% mark soon after.

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

'Your chitin armor is no match for our iron-tipped stingers! Better go hide in your jars!' --common playground taunt

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

Although it was a setback for physics, I'm glad the particle naming rights issue led to the cancelation of Pizza Hut's Superconducting Super Collider in the early 90s, so the Double Stuffed Extra Cheese Topping Quark ended up just being named 'top quark.'

If you pledge more than $50 you'll get on the VIP list and have first dibs on a slot on ANY of the pledge levels in the actual campaign.

Worries assuaged, the numbers become less important than your touches.

We've learned that weird spacing and diacritics in the methodology description are apparently the key to good research; luckily, we've developed an AI tool to help us figure out where to add them.

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

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.

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!)

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

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

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

Could be worse. The last guy in that situation fell for one of the transient trumpeting angels.

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

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

In lieu of mapping software, I once wrote a Perl program which, given a USB GPS receiver and a destination, printed 'LEFT' 'RIGHT' OR 'STRAIGHT' based on my heading.

'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.'

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!

I'm happy with my Kindle 2 so far, but if they cut off the free Wikipedia browsing, I plan to show up drunk on Jeff Bezos's lawn and refuse to leave.

Where did you even get this wall? Return it there and stand it back up right now.

Some of you may be thinking, 'But wait, isn't the brightest star in our sky the Sun?' I think that's a great question and you should totally ask it. On the infinite tree of possible conversations spread out before us, I think that's definitely the most promising branch.

By clicking anywhere, scrolling, or closing this notification, you agree to be legally bound by the witch Sycorax within a cloven pine.

In C, the multiocular O represents the bitwise norxondor gorgonax.

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

I got banned from the county fair for handing out Helium-2 balloons. Apparently the instant massive plasma explosions violated some local ordinance or something.

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.

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

This is a fun explanation to prepare your kids for; it's common and totally wrong. Good lines include 'why does the air have to travel on both sides at the same time?' and 'I saw the Wright brothers plane and those wings were curved the same on the top and bottom!'