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

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

Zero results: 'snake charming' and 'haberdashery'. (Things like 'car' and 'boating' and such are of course the highest, by a huge margin.)

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

I honestly didn't think you could even USE emoji in variable names. Or that there were so many different crying ones.

Under the two-domain system, anyone who punches you is technically an Archaean pathogen.

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

There was something about a cup and a sword and a tree and a green hill ...

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

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

This is probably the first projection in cartographic history that can be criticized for its disproportionate focus on Finland, Mongolia, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

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

No one wants an explanation more than us. Except Ms. Garofalo.

It's important to teach yourself to feel responsible for random events, because with great responsibility comes great power. That's what my wise Uncle Ben told me right before he died; he might still be alive today if only I'd said rabbit rabbit that year!

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.

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

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

I just want to give him a hug or something.

That eggplant is in something of a flaccid state.

What I really want is to hang out where I hung out with my friends in college, but have all my older relatives there too.

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.

An eternity later, the universe having turned out to have positive curvature and lots of mass, the boomerang hits him in the back of the head.

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.

A schism between the pro-panhandle and anti-panhandle factions eventually led to war, but both sides spent too much time working on their flag designs to actually do much fighting.

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

The no-communication theorem states that no communication about the no-communication theorem can clear up the misunderstanding quickly enough to allow faster-than-light signaling.

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

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.

Many a hungry time traveler has Googled 'trilobites shellfish allergy' only to find their carrier had no coverage in the Ordovician.

I found a copy of The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, but the idea of reading it didn't spark joy, so I gave it away.

Oh yeah, I didn't even know they renamed it the Willis Tower in 2009, because I know a normal amount about skyscrapers.

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.

If you're lying in bed tonight and you see yellow eyes glinting in your window, are you being stalked by a puma, a mountain lion, a panther, a catamount, or a cougar? Trick question--in North America, they're all names for the same species, Puma concolor! Isn't learning fun? Anyway, sleep tight!

And when I think about it, a lot of "things I want to do" are just learning about and discussing new tools for tinkering with the chain.

Cloud computing has a ways to go.

The math and philosophy people also claim everything, but the astronomers argue that the stuff they study really only comprises a small number of paper surfaces.

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

I'm not sure if this is actually true

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This was actually wish #406. Wish #2 was for him to lose the ability to remember that each new wish wasn't my first.

I love how Google handles dimensional analysis. Stats are ballpark and vary wildly by time of day and whether your mom is in town.

Elon Musk finally blocked me from the internal Tesla repository because I wouldn't stop sending pull requests for my code supporting steering via vim keybindings.

Actual quote from The Demo: '... an advantage of being online is that it keeps track of who you are and what you’re doing all the time ...'

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

Theoretical physicist: At the Planck length, uncountably many.

I'd like to see more damage assessments for hurricanes hitting New York and flooding Manhattan -- something like the 1938 Long Island Express, but aimed a bit more to the west. It's just a matter of time.

[hair in face] "SEVVVENNN YEEEARRRSSS"

My MRI research shows a clear correlation between the size of the parietal lobe--the part of the brain that handles spatial reasoning--and enjoyment of 3D Doritos®.

In Universe Pro®™ the laws of physics remain unchanged under time reversal, to maintain backward compatibility.

Okay, everyone, cross yourselves, then cross the streams.

I've looked into this, and I can't figure out a way to do it cheaply. And I guess it wouldn't be sanitary.

'Oh, and can I borrow 50 sacks of loose flour, a pile of lithium-ion batteries, a bucket of bleach, and a bucket of vinega--' 'NO!!!!!!'

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

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.

The Stroop-YORP number of a scientific paper is how many of the 16 finalist names (sans 'effect') it manages to casually sneak into the text.

Someone bring me a pocket fan so I can drift around the yard.

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

You will live on forever in our hearts, pushing a little extra blood toward our left hands now and then to give them a squeeze.

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.

Novel ideas and cool explosions are both good, but what I really want from a movie is novel ideas ABOUT cool explosions.

a(b+c)=(ab)+(ac). Politicize that, bitches.

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

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

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!'

Neutral Evil is for people who like keeping the weight nicely centered in the carton, but also hate everyone else who wants that.

The increasing number of graham crackers and chocolate bars in orbit has created a growing risk of Kessler s'mores.

Look, I just think we need to stop coddling those hedonistic roundabout hogs who get into the inner lane and circle for hours, wasting valuable capacity.

'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.'

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

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

It struggles a little with complex positions, like when there are an even number of moves and it has to round down, but when run against itself it's capable of finding some novelties. At one point I saw six knights on the board at once; Stockfish rarely exceeds four.

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

I hear this is an option in the latest Ubuntu release.

Even the powerful, tart Granny Smith cultivar is proving ineffective against new Gran-negative doctors.

Nothing personal, high schoolers.

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.

A term coined by my friend Beth

'Grandpa, what was it like in the Before time?' 'It was hell. People went around saying glass was a slow-flowing liquid. You folks these days don't know how good you have it.'

My Redwall/Jurassic Park crossover fanfic is almost complete!

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

'Is it worth anything?' 'I dunno, is the answer to that question worth another $5?'

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

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

After a while you adjust to the new cicadian rhythm.

[Below] On this site on May 12th, 2023, I finally learned how to use the masonry bit for my drill.

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

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

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

Of course, factions immediately sprang up in favor of '~*~sTaR tReK iNtO dArKnEsS~*~', 'xX_StAr TrEk InTo DaRkNess_Xx', and 'Star Trek lnto Darkness' (that's a lowercase 'L').

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

Right-click or long press (where supported) to save!

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

'Why are you standing in the yard wearing a papal hat and a robe covered in seeds?' 'Well, the Pope is visiting our town next month ...'

We find you guilty of closing your torrents as soon as they finish. Your sentence is unremovable Hungarian subtitles on everything.

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

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

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

Okay, I'm just gonna order pizza, and let's never talk about this again.

I always figured the word 'blog' would sound *less* silly as the years went by.

"I've traveled here from the year 2020 to bring you this vaccine!"

If an anatomical structure is named for a person, it means they were the only person to have it. Pierre Paul Broca had a special area of his brain that created powerful magnetic fields, enabling him to do 19th century fMRI research.

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

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

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

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.

INSIDE ELON MUSK'S NEW ATOMIC CAT

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

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

Medium: Pencil on paper

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

Vertebrae Georg

Usain Bolt holds the world record in the 100 meter speedrun.

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

Placeble 228 x/6n⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜n⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜n⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜n⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜n⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜n⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜

My life goal is to launch a barge into the air and have it land on one of Elon Musk's rockets.

I lead a small but extraordinarily persuasive religion whose only members are door-to-door proselytizers from other faiths.

In general, avoid exposure to any temperatures, pressures, particle energies, or states of matter that physicists think are neat.

David did this

As far as I can tell, Navajo doesn't have a common word for 'zero'. do-neh-lini means 'neutral'.

Brains aside, I wonder how many poorly-written xkcd.com-parsing scripts will break on this title (or ;;"''{<<[' this mouseover text."

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

Your IDE's color may vary.

And the whole setup is just a trap to capture escaping logicians. None of the doors actually lead out.

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.

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.

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

It slowly dawns on us that our parents knew exactly what they were doing.

"Mr. President, what if the unthinkable happens? What if the launch goes wrong, and Napoleon is not stranded on the Moon?" "Have Safire write up a speech."

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.

If most people turn into muderers all of a sudden, we'll need to push out a firmware update or something.

To really expand your mind try some noncartesian porn. Edwin Abbot Abbott has nothing on 'Girls on Girls in Tightly Closed Nonorientable Spaces'.

"Even split between us, this will pay way better than the Jumanji sponsorship I came into the date with."

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.

And I even got out my adorable new netbook!

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

The bottom ones are also potentially bad news for any other planets in our solar system that have been counting on Earth having a stable orbit.

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

Party Mode also enables the feature, but reverses the slider.

Technically, both cars are haunted, but the murder ghosts can't stand listening to the broken GPS for more than a few minutes.

As the CoKF approaches 0, productivity goes negative as you pull OTHER people into chair-spinning contests.

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

Sitting here idly trying to figure out how the population of the Old West in the late 1800s compares to the number of Red Dead Redemption 2 players.

'Are you stealing those LCDs?' 'Yeah, but I'm doing it while my code compiles.'

Subgroup analysis is ongoing.

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

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

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

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

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

It's a good mountain but it really peaked in the 80s.

J.J. Thompson won a Nobel Prize for his work in electricity in gases, but was unfairly passed over for his "An atom is plum pudding, and plum pudding is MADE of atoms! Duuuuude." theory.

Lambda calculus? More like SHAMbda calculus, amirite?

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

Bald-faced hornets are only a 2 on the Schmidt pain index, so I shouldn't complain. The tennis ball ejected from the dryer exhaust vent could have ricocheted off the nest of a much higher-scoring insect before knocking me off the ladder. Really, I'm lucky.

Washable, though only once.

Surrounded by boring mysteries.

Hello, island

Nonrewritable tape?

'Here, I'll put my number in your cell pho -- wait, why is it already here?'

It's even harder if you're an asshole who pronounces <> brackets.

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

I just can't wait for the Better Homes and Gardens list of helpful tips for household reuse of sixteen-inch acrylonitrile-butadiene-styrene phalluses.

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

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

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.

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

Every Roomba needs a dueling harness.

[As security is dragging me away] "Come on, at least I didn't make the mistake in the other direction!"

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

Calm down--there were lots of arthropods living on your skin already. These ones are just bigger.

Add main-belt asteroids to taste.

It'll be hilarious the first few times this happens.

This exotic blade was wrought from a different fallen star. The meteorite was a carbonaceous chondrite, so it's basically a lump of gravel glued into the shape of a sword. A SPACE sword!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The MythBusters are even more sinister.

I spent a long time thinking about how to design a system for long-term organization and storage of subject-specific informational resources without needing ongoing work from the experts who created them, only to realized I'd just reinvented libraries.

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

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?"

Seriously considering buying some illegal drugs to try to turn them back into cold medicine.

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

Also, all financial analysis. And, more directly, D&D.

There's still a chance you were conceived via IVF. But we've checked your mom's college yearbook photos, and whether or not she and your father had sex, it's clear that ... listen, I know this is hard for you.

The worst part is that's the millisigma interval.

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

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.

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

My bracket has 76 trombones led by John Philip Sousa facing off against thousands of emperor penguins led by Morgan Freeman.

SUGGESTIONS FOR FUTURE RESEARCH: No further research is needed as it is frankly none of our business.

Charlie actually delivered the Medicare line almost verbatim in the 1971 movie's Fizzy Lifting Drink scene, but it was ultimately cut from the final release.

$Then we move to phase two. Gas stations store fuel in underground tanks. Normally, these are inaccessible except via the pump. However, with hydraulic fracturing, we-- Wait! Come back!$

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

Younger people get very few joint replacements, yet they're also getting more than older people did at the same age. This means you can choose between 'Why are millennials getting so (many/few) joint replacements?' depending on which trend fits your current argument better.

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

Just tell me everything you're thinking about in order from most important to last, and then we'll be friends and we can eat apples together.

Mr. Jones, watch out for Ms. Lenhart! She's from genus Photuris!

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

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

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

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 HVAC bill for installing the Gulf Stream was enormous.

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

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.

It's okay, they scan the serial numbers and make sure you can't deposit the same bill more than once.

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

It's annoying that the Nastapoka Arc isn't a meteor impact crater, but I truly believe that--with enough time, effort, and determination--we could make it one.

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

My brother once asked me if there was a function to produce a calendar grid from a list of dates in Google Sheets. I replied with a single-cell formula that took in a list of dates and outputted a calendar. It used SEQUENCE(), REGEXMATCH(), and a double-nested ARRAYFORMULA(), and it locked up the browser for 15 seconds every time it ran. I think he learned a lot about asking me things.

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

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

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

I'm sure the building inspectors will approve my design once they finally manage to escape.

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

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

"You know lightning, right? When electric charge builds up in a cloud and then discharges in a giant spark? Ask me why that happens." "Why does tha--" "No clue. We think it's related to the hair thing."

The rare compound solar-lunar-nephelogical eclipse

How could you choose avoiding a little pain over understanding a magic lightning machine?

This digital music thing will probably reach its endgame sometime in the next decade or so. These are very exciting times.

This one makes me wince every time I think about it

It's going in A collection of satellites skewered with pins and mounted in display boxes. Not necessarily MY collection.

This year, our team took home the dark blue ribbon, better than the midnight blue we got last year but still short of the winning navy blue.

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

If you don't end the 99 Bottles of Beer recursion at N=0 it just becomes The Other Song That Never Ends.

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

DOWNSIDES: Adobe people may periodically email your newsroom to ask you to call it an 'Adobe® PDF document,' but they'll reverse course once they learn how sarcastically you can pronounce the registered trademark symbol.

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

YOU THINK THIS IS FUNNY?

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.

In Dimensional Chess, every move is annotated '?!'.

And I was really impressed with how they managed to shock the Goatse guy.

I occasionally do this with mile markers on the highway.

The robot is pregnant. It isn't mine.

P.S. We're going to the beach this weekend, so I'm attaching my preregistration forms for that trip now, before we find out whether it produces any interesting results.

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

The use of the 'Garfield' character for the purposes of this parody qualifies as fair use under the Copyright Act of 1976, 17 U.S.C. sec. 107. See Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music (92-1292), 510 U.S. 569

When they moved production from New Zealand to the UK and switched from the runny white centers to the thick, frosting-like filling, it got way harder to cook them scrambled.

The distinction between a ship and a boat is a line drawn in water.

Just yesterday I bought my first non-DRM'd songs (The Last Vegas, in keeping with my 'I only listen to things from Guitar Hero' theme).

As the King of All Cosmos remarked, 'Is it that it's fun, or that it lets you forget yourself?'

I am so excited about the Kepler mission. This is the second most important thing our species has ever done, right behind inventing the concept of delivery pizza.

No, a hydroplane doesn't land on water--that's an aquaplane. A hydroplane is a plane that gets electric power from an onboard water reservoir with a tiny dam and turbines.

The local police, building inspector, and fire marshal are all contesting my 'safety' assertion, or would be if they could reach me past all the traps.

I hope we can stop them

'Detector! What would the Bayesian statistician say if I asked him whether the--' [roll] 'I AM A NEUTRINO DETECTOR, NOT A LABYRINTH GUARD. SERIOUSLY, DID YOUR BRAIN FALL OUT?' [roll] '... yes.'

Junior astronomers hate getting put on board update duty, but someone's gotta make sure that stuff is still up there.

Time to dance in front of Mary Jane! If I'm lucky, she'll turn out not to practice pre-copulatory sexual cannibalism!

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

There's nothing hotter than porn dubbed over with a poorly-mic'd teenager's voice explaining each step in a droning monotone. 'okay, we're almost at the spawn point ... separate the labia, but watch out, there are more inside them ..."

It's not hard when you have the same thought like 40 or 50 percent of the time.

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

AAAAAA A ÃA̧AȂA̦ ǍÅÂÃĀÁȂ AAAAAAA!

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

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

My upcoming album, 'Linked List', has covers of 'The Purple People Eater', the Ninja Turtles theme, 'Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini', and the Power Rangers theme, with every song played to the tune of the next.

The cycle seems to be 'we need these symbols to clarify what types of things we're referring to!' followed by 'wait, it turns out words already do that.'

On the other hand, it took us embarrassingly long to clue in to the lung cancer/cigarette thing, so I guess the real lesson is "figuring out which ideas are true is hard."

We'll pay you $1.47 to post on social media about our products, $2.05 to mention it in any group chats you're in, and 11 cents per passenger each time you drive your office carpool past one of our billboards.

I'm gonna call the cops and get Chad arrested for theft, then move all my stuff to the house across the street. Hopefully the owners there are more responsible.

2048: "Great news for Maine—we're once again an independent state!!! Thanks, @unicode, for ruling in our favor and sending troops to end New Hampshire's annexation. 🙏🚁🎖️"

Obligatory bad guy: This operation is sheer foolishness, and it's not happening on my watch! Mainly because I can't figure out how to adjust the time.

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

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

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

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.

Sure, we could stop dictators and pandemics, but we could also make the signs on every damn diagram make sense.

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

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.

The rope keeps breaking, I'm covered in bruises and scrapes, and I've barely reached the end of my driveway, but I don't care--I'm determined to become the first person to commute to work by tetherball.

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

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

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

At least I never gave her the root password.

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.

But surely I owe you an accurate answer!

I'm not very good at meeting people.

U+2A0B ⨋ Mathematicians need to calm down

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

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.

Trivia: Elaine is actually her middle name.

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

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

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

Wow, rude of you to regift literally every gift that you or anyone else has ever received.

It's probably just me. If driving were as dangerous as it seems, hundreds of people would be dying every day!

Dear Reader: Enclosed is a check for ninety-eight cents. Using your work, I have proven that this equals the amount you requested.

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

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

Note that this implies you should NOT honk solely because I stopped for a pedestrian and you're behind me.

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

It also brings all the boys, and everything else, to the yard.

$The index of radio refraction does have a lot of variation, which might throw off your calculations, so you can also look at the difference in brightness between the visible flash and more-attenuated UV and x-rays.$

People may complain about readability, but even with jpeg compression, extracting the data points is usually computationally feasible if there aren't too many of them.

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.

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

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

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

Welcome to the International Space Station Exclamation Point!

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.

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

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

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

The place I'd least like to live is the farm in the background of those diagrams showing how tornadoes form.

If you're 15 or younger, then just remember that it's nevertheless probably too late to be a child prodigy.

I'm not saying it's all bad, but that movie has not aged as well as my teenage self in 2000 was confident it would.

Freestyle rapping is basically applied Markov chains.

Today's consumers who order their drones off the internet don't know the joy of going out in nature and returning with a drone that you caught yourself, whose angry owners you fought off with your own two hands.

58% of the state has gone into plaid.

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

I didn't even realize they MADE a novelization of "Surf Ninjas." How did you-- Oh my god, it's signed by the author?!

Do YOU remember the skylight being this big?

In Connor's second thesis it is stated 'There is no fate but what we make for ourselves.' Does the routine destroy our creativity or do we lose creativity and fall into the routine? Anyway, who's up for a road trip!

The retina is the exposed surface of the brain, so if you think about a pot of gold while looking at a rainbow, then there's one at BOTH ends.

At 8 drinks, you switch the torrent from FreeBSD to Microsoft Bob. C'mon, it'll be fun!

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

Whenever I see a picture of the moon where the points go more than halfway around, I assume it's being eclipsed by one of those Independence Day ships and interpret the rest of the image in light of that.

Cue letters from anthropology majors complaining that this view of numerolinguistic development perpetuates a widespread myth. They get to write letters like that because when you're not getting a real science degree you have a lot of free time. Zing!

If you find an ash deposition layer from a year in which an eruption destroyed an island that had Camellia sinensis growing on it, you can make a Gone Island Ice_τ.

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.

Gorilla, yes. Adorable golden retriever, yes. But it says nothing about meerkats.

The universe long dead, IsaAC surveyed the formless chaos. At last, he had arrived at an answer. 'I like you,' he declared to the void, 'but I don't LIKE like you.'

You also refuse to buy Cisco products because you hate the Thong Song, O. Henry, Deep Space Nine, freshwater whitefish, teenaged Incan emperors, Brak's brother, and vegetable-based shortening.

I heard the general anesthesia drugs can cause amnesia, so when I woke up mid-extraction I started taking notes on my hand so I'd remember things later. I managed 'AWAKE BUT EVERYTHING OK' before the dental assistant managed to find and confiscate all my pens.

'We're shocked by the Notre Dame fire. Click for our tribute to--' [okay] 'Now that we're all staying at home these past few weeks thanks to this new coronavirus, we--' [okay]

Baseballs do present a challenge to this theory, but I'm convinced we just haven't found the right seasoning.

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

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.

If so great a deductive mind as Arthur Conan Doyle can be fooled by the Cottingley Deepfakes, what chance do we mortals have? Soon our very reality will be dictated by the whims of Frances (9) and Elsie (16).

What an incredible smell you've discovered.

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

Well, *I* think I'm real. Look at me. Look at my face. Cut me and I'll bleed. What more do you want? Please don't go.

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

(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]

What's weirder is that muons turned out to be INCREDIBLY cute.

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

More actual results: 'Hello. My name is Inigo Montoya. You [are the best. The best thing ever]', 'Revenge is a dish best served [by a group of people in my room]', and 'They may take our lives, but they'll never take our [money].'

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.

It's okay, we can just feed the one-pixel image into an AI upscaler and recover the original image, or at least one that's just as cool.

Later, when I remember that I'm calling movers, I frantically scribble over the labels and write 'NORMAL HOUSE STUFF' on all of them, which actually makes things worse.

We're adding some industrial flypaper to minimize reflection or scattering of customers who might complain.

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

Wait a minute. If I'm escaping from a submarine at 50 meters, then I'll *definitely* need a flashlight to find air pockets for gradual decompression on the way up. Time to start shopping professional dive lights.

I calculate that the electrons in radiation therapy hit you at 99.8% of the speed of light, and the beam used in a 90-second gamma ray therapy session could, if fired with less precision, kill a horse (they did not let me test this).

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

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.

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

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

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

Starring Macaulay Culkin.

Just thought you should know

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

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

This reminds me of that video where ... no? How have you not seen that? Oh man, let me find it. No, it's ok, we can go back to your video later.

It means shuffling quickly past nuns on the street with ketchup in your palms, pretending you're hiding stigmata.

Good to be a little wary of advice that sounds too much like a self pep talk.

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

Your point that the world contains multiple problems is a real slam-dunk argument against fixing any of them.

I never trust anyone who's more excited about success than about doing the thing they want to be successful at.

There's always the hope that if you sit and watch for long enough, the beachball will vanish and the thing it interrupted will return.

But to us there is but one God, plus or minus one. --1 Corinthians 8:6±2.

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

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

"I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on Venus and returning him safely to--" [an aide frantically whispers in the president's ear for a moment] "... of landing a man on Venus."

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

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

There's one person in Missouri who says "carbo bev" who the entire rest of the country HATES.

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.

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

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

1. Flatten the curve. 2. Steepen the curve. 3. Hang out.

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.

Patients at least found it to be an improvement over Millikan's incredibly messy and unpleasant oil drop suspension procedure.

Every choice, no matter how small, begins a new story.

Hey, it says here that if you dream about your teeth falling out, it means they're spreading.

I learned from Achewood that since this poem is in ballad meter, it can be sung to the tune of Gilligan's Island. Since then, try as I might, I haven't ONCE been able to read it normally.

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

In my new scale, °X, 0 is Earths' record lowest surface temperature, 50 is the global average, and 100 is the record highest, with a linear scale between each point and adjustment every year as needed.

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

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

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?

IATA stands for International AirporT Abbreviation.

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

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

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.

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

Tonight's top story: Lucifer, the Prince of Darkness, died in his home this morning at the age of [unintelligible rune]. Due to the large number of sharks inhabiting his former kingdom, no body could be recovered.

Romantic comedy heroines, I'm talking to you.

It's time to draw the line.

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."