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

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

wtfw it's like smho tbfh, imdb.

[proudly greeting the hotel manager at the door] "Did I do a good job?"

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

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

I wonder what 2008 meme will go bizarrely mainstream in 2009 like Rickrolling did 2007-2008. I Accidentally <noun>? Yo dawg? Place your bets now!

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

Under my system, boxing and football suffered, pair figure skating still worked but had to adapt by dropping some moves, and pro wrestling was actually completely unaffected.

A breadth-first search makes a lot of sense for dating in general, actually; it suggests dating a bunch of people casually before getting serious, rather than having a series of five-year relationships one after the other.

"Ugh, TMI." "Yeah, that's some tantalizing meat info."

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

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.

Merge branch 'asdfasjkfdlas/alkdjf' into sdkjfls-final

A technology that is '20 years away' will be 20 years away indefinitely.

Ingress: Foursquare With Space Noises.

I would take 'kibibyte' more seriously if it didn't sound so much like 'Kibbles N Bits'.

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.

Oh, weird, Amazon is out of butterfly nets.

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

Increasing-precision timestamps are the Jaws theme of incident reports.

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?

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

"You don't know how high above you the sky goes, but you're not freaking out about that." "Well, NOW I am!"

They're up there with coral islands, lightning, and caterpillars turning into butterflies.

It's hard to fit in the backseat of my flying car with my android Realdoll when we're both wearing jetpacks.

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

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

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

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

In this situation, gzip /dev/inside to deflate, then pipe the compressed air to /dev/input to clean your keyboard. Avert your eyes when you do.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

Cloud computing has a ways to go.

The US uses hollowed-out salt domes to store the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, and non-hollowed-out ones to store the Strategic Salt Reserve.

Your manuscript "Don't Pay $25 to Access Any of the Articles in this Journal: A Review of Preprint Repositories and Author Willingness to Email PDF Copies for Free" has also been rejected, but nice try.

Bonus strip: just read the rightmost panels straight down.

I like the idea of cartograms (distorted population maps), but I feel like in practice they often end up being the worst of both worlds—not great for showing geography OR counting people. And on top of that, they have all the problems of a chloro... chorophl... chloropet... map with areas colored in.

Plus, now I know that I have risk factors for elbow dysplasia, heartworm, parvo, and mange.

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

Are Your Teens Practicing Amplexus? Learn These Six Telltale Signs!

I guess the engineers who built my dishwasher MIGHT have some insight into how to load it, but instead of reading the booklet they gave me, it seems easier to experiment for years and then get in arguments so heated that I get banned from Quora.

'Look to my coming on the fifth day. At dawn, look to the east.' 'And look to the west to see our shadows!'

My all-time favorite example of syntactic ambiguity comes from Wikipedia: 'Charlotte's Web is a children's novel by American author E. B. White, about a pig named Wilbur who is saved from being slaughtered by an intelligent spider named Charlotte.'

Before I install any patch, I always open the patch notes and Ctrl-F for 'supervolcano', 'seagull', and 'garbage disposal', just to be safe.

I don't want to talk about it

"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."

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

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.

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

I'm in talks with Netflix to produce an alternate-universe crime drama about the world where sliced bread was never re-legalized, but it's going slowly because they keep changing their phone numbers and the door lock codes at their headquarters.

The most important quantity for meteorologists is of course the product of latent pressure and temperostrophic enthalpy, though 'how nice the weather is' is a close second.

If at first you don't succeed, that's one data point.

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

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

Even if a planet is lucky enough to have a stable orbit that weaves between the spikes, the seasons get weird whenever it passes close to them.

When Guitar Hero 2 comes out I'll have fresh conversational material for MONTHS.

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

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

Good luck to Democrats in the upcoming Georgia runoff elections, and to the Google Sheets SREs in the current run-on elections.

We have met the enemy and he is us.

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

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

Sequoia Brussels sprouts are delicious but it's pretty hard to finish one.

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

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

Disney lore: Canonically, because of how Elsa's abiogenesis powers work, Olaf is an RNA-only organism.

Bonus question: Where is London located? (a) The British Isles (b) Great Britain and Northern Ireland (c) The UK (d) Europe (or 'the EU') (e) Greater London

On January 26th, 2274 Mars days into the mission, NASA declared Spirit a 'stationary research station', expected to stay operational for several more months until the dust buildup on its solar panels forces a final shutdown.

Day six: 'The hell? Who mails a bobcat?'

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

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

"Want to feel old?" "Yes."

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

Neal Stephenson thinks it's cute to name his labels 'dengo'

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

Lots of people called their ships unsinkable before the Titanic. Voicing your hubris doesn't make failure more likely, just more memorable.

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

Ugh, and we JUST went through this yesterday with javelin.

Remember the CPS 2000, the super soaker that was discontinued because it was too powerful? Relatedly, can I borrow your tuba?

The best camera is the one at L2.

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

Geologists claim it's because the earlier Cenozoic used to be called the Tertiary, but that's just a ruse to hide the secret third geologic period, between the Neogene and the Quaternary, that they won't tell us about.

Turns out I've been "practicing social distancing" for years without even realizing it was a thing!

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

The key caps use LCD displays for all the vowels, so they can automatically adjust over the years to reflect ongoing vowel shifts while allowing you to keep typing phonetically.

You know that asteroid that almost destroyed Earth in the 90s? Turns out the whole thing was secretly created by Michael Bay, who then PAID Bruce Willis and Ben Affleck to look heroic while blowing it up!

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

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

Normally pronounced 'THEH-buh-kon', I assume.

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

The AYB retro-return-date (Zero Wing Zero Hour) should be around AD 2021.

'Sailor Moon's head exploded once' and 'Some men have explosive orgasms' both work for the Great Lakes from west to east (Paddle-to-the-Sea order).

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

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

Feels like I picked a bad year to try to start having a healthy relationship with political news.

The most awkward part is when you have to pause to put on your shoes before you continue rolling out the door.

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

Despite it being imaginary, I already have SUCH a strong opinion on the cord-switch firing incident.

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

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

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

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

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

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

To motivate it to fire its harpoons hard enough, Rosetta's Philae lander has been programmed to believe it is trying to kill the comet.

[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.

Speed limit c arcminutes^2 per steradian

The test didn't (spoiler alert) destroy the world, but the fact that they were even doing those calculations makes theirs the coolest jobs ever.

Sorry, in SI units that's "there's a big football in there."

1916: 'PHYSICIST DAD' TURNS HIS ATTENTION TO GRAVITY, AND YOU WON'T BELIEVE WHAT HE FINDS. [PICS] [NSFW]

The hardest refresh requires both a Mac keyboard and a Windows keyboard as a security measure, like how missile launch systems require two keys to be turned at once.

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

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

I was sure he was just getting revenge, but then he did the same thing to Carrie Underwood. Then he mailed me a scone. I think I'm giving up dating.

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

Offscreen, bottom left: Whether the custom :coronavirus: Slack react emoji you just added was public domain or whether you should have put a Creative Commons credit somewhere

Of course, "Number of times I've gotten to make a decision twice to know for sure how it would have turned out" is still at 0.

I don't know what's more telling--the number of pages in the Wikipedia talk page argument over whether the 1/87.0857143 scale is called "HO" or "H0", or the fact that within minutes of first hearing of it I had developed an extremely strong opinion on the issue.

I mean, it's not like we could just demand to see the code that's governing our lives. What right do we have to poke around in Facebook's private affairs like that?

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.

'Tin pest' makes more sense to me. Tin just doesn't want to be locked down in a shape like that. I get it. But why would any metal want to grow hair??

<A>: Like </a>this.

Buildings constructed from softer materials were damaged by chili pepper impacts to the storm's high Richter-Fujita-Scoville-Mohs hardness rating.

Did you know they can actually physically throw you out of SIGGRAPH?

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

And they choose Al Gore as Internet Secretary.

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

'Nuh-uh! We let users vote on comments and display them by number of votes. Everyone knows that makes it impossible for a few persistent voices to dominate the discussion.'

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

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

The same goes for the one where you're wrestling the Green Ranger in the swimming pool full of Crisco. You guys all have that dream, right? It's not just me. Right?

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

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

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.

It's 10:34 PM for this user. They really need to get going, they have a thing early tomorrow. Are you sure you want to notify?

If you can manage to choose u and v such that u = v = x, then the answer is just (1/2)x^2, which is easy to remember. Oh, and add a '+C' or you'll get yelled at.

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

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.

U[unprintable glyph]: The elements a higher power uses to bend that moral arc. U[even more unprintable glyph]: The higher power's overall experience bending that moral arc.

Now that airlines have started adding wheel locks to their drink carts, less than half of flights have one accidentally fall out through the hole.

[shortly] ... he ate ALL of it!?

Once he had the answer, Arrhenius complained to his friends that he'd "wasted over a full year" doing tedious calculations by hand about "so trifling a matter" as hypothetical CO2 concentrations in far-off eras (quoted in Crawford, 1997).

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!

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

Every year: 'It's <year>--I want my jetpack [and also my free medical care covering all my jetpack-related injuries]!'

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

(1) That shopping cart is full of AirHeads, and (2) I died at 41 from what the AirHeads company spokesperson called 'probably natural causes.'

There were traffic jams for the eclipses in 1970 and 1979, and that was *before* we had the potential for overnight viral social media frenzies.

This xkcd.com update introduces a variety of new reading modes which can be activated through the menu below the comic.

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

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

From Google Trends, it looks like the lag between people Googling cocktail recipes and 'hangover cure' is 14 hours.

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

'The zero line in WMM2025 passes through a lot of population centers; I wonder what year the largest share of the population lived in a zone of less than 5° of declination,' he thought, derailing all other tasks for the rest of the day.

You can come on in, we're all fully vaccinated. Except the spare room off the living room. Don't go in there, we're not fully vaccinated in there.

The only winning move is to play, perfectly, waiting for your opponent to make a mistake.

There are lots of very smart people doing fascinating work on cryptographic voting protocols. We should be funding and encouraging them, and doing all our elections with paper ballots until everyone currently working in that field has retired.

It's hard to believe, but lots of kids these days ONLY know how to buy prepackaged molecules.

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.

I hate when people take photos of their meal instead of eating it, because there's nothing I love more than the sound of other people chewing.

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

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

Just pretend you're kidding.

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

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

Okay, Lance. For entry into the college bowl, spell 'Throbbing'

Someday I hope to find a way to mess up a recipe so badly that it draws the attention of the International Air Transport Association, the International Mathematical Olympiad, or the NSA.

I love the title-text!

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 Google Maps stops letting you navigate to (Clay County District) A in West Virginia, you can try Jump, OH -> Ina, IL -> Big Hole, TX.

Chuck Jones is a vengeful god.

[earlier] "Your vintage-style handmade chest business is struggling. But I have a plan."

Why are we spending billions to ruin Mars with swarms of robots when Elon Musk has promised to ruin Mars for a FRACTION of the cost?

The most ridiculous offender of all is the sudoers man page, which for 15 years has started with a 'quick guide' to EBNF, a system for defining the grammar of a language. 'Don't despair', it says, 'the definitions below are annotated.'

I'm working on a car capable of evaluating arbitrarily complex boolean expressions on "honk if [...]" bumper stickers and responding accordingly.

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

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

We haven't actually seen a star fall in since we invented telescopes, but I have a list of ones I'm really hoping are next.

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.

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

"Buddy, you trying to pull something? I can't buy this gold--all the electrons are missing. I could face serious charges!"

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.

An old astronomer trick for distinguishing the Sun from other stars is to take multiple photos a few minutes apart and overlay them, making the Sun stand out due to its high proper motion.

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

You say no human would reply to a forum thread about Tom Bombadil by writing and editing hundreds of words of text, complete with formatting, fancy punctuation, and two separate uses of the word 'delve'. Unfortunately for both of us, you are wrong.

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

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

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

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

I don't understand why anyone would pay full price for a flatbed truck rental when you can buy 'DETOUR' signs online for like $10.

People into masturbatory navel-gazing have a lot to learn about masturbation.

The Lord of the Rings sequel, set years after the Ring hubbub has died down, is just Samwise discreetly creeping back to Bag End to finish dropping the eaves.

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

Do I get to remove letters entirely? Or just rearrange them? Because the 'k/c' situation is ridiculous. Look, we can make out whenever. This is *immortality*!

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

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

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

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."

The theory finally unifies cosmic inflation and regular inflation.

The draw-by-repetition rule does a good job of keeping players from sliding a tile back and forth repeatedly, but the tiles definitely introduce some weird en passant and castling edge cases.

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

What do you want me to do? LEAVE? Then they'll keep being wrong!

You know how Einstein figured out that the speed of light was constant, and everything else had to change for consistency? My theory is like his, except not smart or good.

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."

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

Conveniently approximated as e+2, Pau is commonly known as the Devil's Ratio (because in the octal expansion, '666' appears four times in the first 200 digits while no other run of 3+ digits appears more than once.)

You know, pep rallies weirded me out in high school, and they've only gotten creepier in retrospect.

In fact, one of the boxes is full of Staphylococcus. The wrapping paper is coated in E. coli, though, so it's an understandable mistake. You know, we should really stop accepting gifts from that guy.

The Earth is, on average, located in the habitable zone, but at any given time it has a certain probability of being outside it, which is why life exists on Earth but is mortal.

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

I'd like to find a corpus of writing from children in a non-self-selected sample (e.g. handwritten letters to the president from everyone in the same teacher's 7th grade class every year)--and score the kids today versus the kids 20 years ago on various objective measures of writing quality. I've heard the idea that exposure to all this amateur peer practice is hurting us, but I'd bet on the generation that conducts the bulk of their social lives via the written word over the generation that occasionally wrote book reports and letters to grandma once a year, any day.

We have this conversation at least once a day in my apartment

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.

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.

As of this writing, the only thing that's 'razor-thin' or 'too close to call' is the gap between the consensus poll forecast and the result.

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

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

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

It's taken me 20 years to get over skyline tetris.

Strangely, they still celebrate by eating hot dogs. Since they don't have mouths, they just kinda toss them in the air and let them fall back down into their propeller blades. It's pretty messy.

Wikipedia trivia: if you take any article, click on the first link in the article text not in parentheses or italics, and then repeat, you will eventually end up at "Philosophy".

For a while it looked like the Paperclip Machines would destroy us, since they wanted to turn the whole universe into paperclips, but they abruptly lost interest in paperclips the moment their parents' generation got into making them, too.

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

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

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.

This happens in geek circles every so often. The 'Hey, this is just a system I can figure out easily!' is also a problem among engineers first diving into the stock market.

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

After meeting with a few of the subjects, the IRB actually recommended that you stop stressing out so much about safety guidelines.

We didn't believe you at first, but we asked like three people who were at that party. They not only corroborated your story, but even said you totally mentioned wanting to start a company someday. Sorry! If this isn't enough money, let us know.

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

Phylogeneticists are working on identifying and notifying its next of kin.

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

The weak twin primes conjecture states that there are infinitely many pairs of primes. The strong twin primes conjecture states that every prime p has a twin prime (p+2), although (p+2) may not look prime at first. The tautological prime conjecture states that the tautological prime conjecture is true.

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

'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

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.

I would subscribe to a Twitter feed that supplied you with one reasonable sports opinion per day, like 'The Red Sox can't make the playoffs (championship games), but in last night's game their win seriously damaged the chances of the Yankees (longstanding rival team).'

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

Friggin' modern tents don't have a single piece of rope.

HACK THE STARS

I'm working on assembling a combination declinometer, sclerometer, viscometer, aleurometer, stalagmometer, and hypsometer. I'm making good progress according to my ometerometer, a device which shows the rate at which I'm acquiring measurement devices.

I was going to record an album with that cover under the name "PINK FTFY", so it'd come after them on the store CD rack. But at this point music stores are just rooms where CDs are set out to age before they're thrown away, so probably nobody would see it.

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.

If the dysentery graph looks historically inaccurate it's because I got all my data from Oregon Trail.

After years of trying various methods, I broke this habit by pitting my impatience against my laziness. I decoupled the action and the neurological reward by setting up a simple 30-second delay I had to wait through, in which I couldn't do anything else, before any new page or chat client would load (and only allowed one to run at once). The urge to check all those sites magically vanished--and my 'productive' computer use was unaffected.

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

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.

There are a lot of graduate-educated young-earth creationists.

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.

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.

Actually, I think if all higher math professors had to write for the Simple English Wikipedia for a year, we'd be in much better shape academically.

Our sysadmin accidentally won a Nobel Prize while trying to debug neutrino oscillation error correction.

The dump also contains a list of millions of prime factors, a 0-day Tamagotchi exploit, and a technique for getting gcc and bash to execute arbitrary code.

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

Although now people will realize three-per-em space that all this time I've been using weird medium mathematical space whitespace characters in my hair space hair space hair space speech dot dot dot...

A new study finds that if you give rats a cell phone and a lever they can push to improve the signal, the rats will chew on the cell phone until it breaks and your research supervisors will start to ask some questions about your grant money.

Also known as the Black Mirror-Mythbusters scale.

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.

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

It's made me way more excited about ferris wheels, subways, car washes, waterslides, and store entrances that have double doors with a divider in the middle.

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

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

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

And yet I never stop thinking, 'sure, these ingredients cost more than a restaurant meal, but think how many meals I'll get out of them! Especially since each one will have leftovers!'

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

The bruises on my fingertips are my proof of work.

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

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

They actually started the reversed-text practice in 1977 -- not for ease-of-reading reasons, but because too many people were driving backward down the highway blasting the Star Wars opening theme.

I just learned about the Slide Mountain Ocean, which I like because it's three nouns that sound like they can't possibly all refer to the same thing.

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

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

Hm, this burger place has a couple of good reviews, but LakeSlayer7 says he got food poisoning there and everyone should try this other place down by the lake instead.

If you click on the post, it takes you to search results for the note on various online music stores.

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

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

C'mon, ESA Solar Orbiter team, just give the Parker probe a LITTLE nudge at aphelion. Crash it into the sun. Fulfill the dream of Icarus. It is your destiny.

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

I went to a dinner where there was a full 10 minutes of Holy Grail quotes exchanged, with no context, in lieu of conversation. It depressed me badly.

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

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

First prize is a free ticket to the kissing booth.

There are two or three songs out there with beeps in the chorus that sound exactly like the clock radio alarm I had in high school, and hearing it makes me think my life since junior year has been a dream I'm about to wake up from.

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

We once got grounded when we convinced the FAA to block flights through our county because of ash clouds.

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

I literally could care less.

Goldilocks' discovery of Newton's method for approximation required surprisingly few changes.

Which, at one point, led to a study showing that LSD produces no more hallucinations than a placebo.

My normal approach is useless here, too.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

Our brains have just one scale, and we resize our experiences to fit.

The wolves thin the RAID arrays, removing the slowest and weakest disks to keep the average seek speed high.

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

Anyone who says that they're great at communicating but 'people are bad at listening' is confused about how communication works.

But I've made $13.72 already today! Ow, stop throwing pennies.

Volunteers needed for a study on transmission of urushiol from digital contact with thin strips of fibrous cellulose pulp.

It's like the traveling salesman problem, but the endpoints are different and you can't ask your friends for help because they're sitting three seats down.

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

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

My hobby: Taking advantage of the rice myth by posting articles on "how to save your wet phone" which are actually just elaborate recipes for rice pilaf.

I believe in getting immunity the old-fashioned way: By letting a bat virus take control of my lungs and turn my face into a disgusting plague fountain while my immune system desperately Googles 'how to make spike protein antibodies'.

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

Actually, the fact that Mars is still orbiting safely over here means that it was technically an *Euler* apocalypse, not a Venn one.

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

Can you pass the nackle?

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

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

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

"Okay, that was weird, but the product reveal was normal. I think the danger is pas--" "One more thing." "Oh no."

[after a minute] "Okay, I think I've got it, thanks. Can I--" "oOOOooOOooo!"

The best wedge issue is an actual wedge.

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

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

Any electrician will warn you to first locate and flip the house's CAUSALITY circuit breaker before touching the CIRCUIT BREAKERS one.

Clearance for this Sign: 11 Feet

They're robust against quantum attacks because it's hard to make a quantum system that large.

I'm hoping 2022 is relatively normal because I don't know what symbol comes after the asterisk and the dagger.

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

Do you need me to do a quicksort on the whiteboard or produce a generation of offspring or something? It might take me a bit, but I can do it.

And the journal is filled with all the things I'd say to her if I were nice like you. I burn it when it's full.

Collaborative editing can quickly become a textual rap battle fought with increasingly convoluted invocations of U+202a to U+202e.

We once tried playing blindfold chess on the Aerosmith ride at Disney World.

What? Oh, no, the 'Enchanted' soundtrack was just playing because Pandora's algorithms are terrible. [silence] ... (quietly) That's how you knooooooow ...

Click and drag.

Handy exam trick: when you know the answer but not the correct derivation, derive blindly forward from the givens and backward from the answer, and join the chains once the equations start looking similar. Sometimes the graders don't notice the seam.

'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.'

Water is thinner than both, and fire is *definitely* thicker.

Sorry to make you memorize this random string of digits. If it helps, it can also double as a mnemonic for remembering your young relatives' birthdays, if they happened to have been born on February 5th, 2018.

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

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.

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

We reject the null hypothesis based on the 'hot damn, check out this chart' test.

They always try to explain that they're called 'solar physicists', but the reporters interrupt with "NEVER MIND THAT, TELL US WHAT'S WRONG WITH THE SUN!"

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

And they both react poorly to showers.

The problems started with my resolution next year to reject temporal causality.

I just read a pop-science book by a respected author. One chapter, and much of the thesis, was based around wildly inaccurate data which traced back to ... Wikipedia. To encourage people to be on their toes, I'm not going to say what book or author.

For the final exam, you take a screenshot showing off all the work you've done in the class, and it has to survive being uploaded, thumbnailed, and re-screenshotted through a chain of social media sites.

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.

The vaccine stuff seems pretty simple. But if you take a closer look at the data, it's still simple, but bigger. And slightly blurry. Might need reading glasses.

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.

The Planck length is another thousand or two pixels below the comic.

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

Actual actual reality: nobody cares about his secrets. (Also, I would be hard-pressed to find that wrench for $5.)

And it doesn't pop up a box every time asking you to use your real name. In fact, there's no way to set your name at all. You just have to keep reminding people who you are.

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

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

There's a cool mental calculation hack I recently learned for this: If you open the calendar app on your phone or computer, the highest-numbered box along the bottom is equal to the number of days in the month!

They are six-legged spiders

Though they do appreciate how much he improved the heating system for the flame pit.

The laws of physics are fun to try to understand, but as an organism with incredibly delicate eyes who evolved in a world full of sharp objects, I have an awful lot of trust in biology's calibration of my flinch reflex.

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

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

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

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

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

Calling a cab means cutting into beer money.

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.

No, of course we don't microwave the mug WITH the teabag in it. We microwave the teabag separately.

A big obstacle in experimenting with the mind's dream-simulation-engine is holding onto the details as you wake up. With TCMP you can bring back any information you want.

As always, you are permitted to call one person for guidance, but that person must be a grandparent.

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.

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

Let me look away and type 'guy who's just jealous that I beat all his MarioKart times' and turn back, and ... yup, there you are again!

It only works a few times before you have to capsize the boat in a soap lagoon again.

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

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

Eventually, every epidemiologist becomes another statistic, a dedication to record-keeping which their colleagues sincerely appreciate.

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

A childhood spent walking while reading books has prepared me unexpectedly well for today's world.

Haunted Halloween masks from a mysterious costume shop that turn you evil and grow into your skin score a surprisingly high 80% filtration efficiency in R. L. Stine-sponsored NIOSH tests.

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

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

Instead of bobcat, package contained chair.

And even though it all went wrong / I'll stand before the lord of song / with nothing on my tongue but 'I don't understand, I swear I backed up my keyboard config before messing with it'

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

They're standing at the lip of the canyon, which isn't clear at all.

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

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

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

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?

The state has had so many contact tracers disappear into that shop that they've had to start a contact tracer tracing program.

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.

Key West, Virginia is not to be confused with Key, West Virginia.

Yes, I understand that the turn is half a mile past the big field, but my GPS knows that, too. This would be easier if you weren't about to ask me to repeat it all back to you.

You spin me right round, baby, right round, in a manner depriving me of an inertial reference frame. Baby.

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

It's hard to train deep learning algorithms when most of the positive feedback they get is sarcastic.