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

Blatantly banking on customers not understanding that it's like a Hollywood studio advertising that their new movie was 'watched by Roger Ebert'.

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

Using diacritics correctly is not my forté.

Biology is really struggling; they're barely at 93% and they keep finding more ants.

"10 minutes ago we were down to only 2 0s!" "How many do we have now?" "I ... don't know!!"

"Epsihootamoo doopsiquorps" --the Schrödinger equation for the hydrogen atom

Some organization has been paying to keep this up and it hasn't been removed from search results. Seems like two votes of confidence to me.

If it were a two or above I wouldn't be able to answer because it would mean a pause in the screaming.

If you tune out again, when you tune back in you'll be hearing about dusty plasma fission fragment rockets.

It also works for anything you teach someone else to do. "Oh yeah, I trained a pair of neural nets, Emily and Kevin, to respond to support tickets."

I think Voyager 1 would be just past the event horizon, but slightly less than halfway to the bright ring.

I may have also tossed one of a pair of teleportation rings into the ocean, with interesting results.

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

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.)

I hear that there are actual lyrics later on in Land of 1,000 Dances, but other than the occasional 'I said,' I've never listened long enough to hear any of them.

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

Since it sounds like your time spent typing can't possibly be less productive than your time spent not typing, have you tried typing SLOWER?

Arboretum Owner Denied Standing in Garden Path Suit on Grounds Grounds Appealing Appealing

NO FATE BUT THE NARRATIVES WE IMPOSE ON LIFE'S RANDOM CHAOS TO DISTRACT OURSELVES FROM OUR EXISTENTIAL PLIGHT

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.

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

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.

A partial eclipse is like a cool sunset. A total eclipse is like someone broke the sky.

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).

Remember, your answers to the physics census are confidential; we will not be issuing Pauli exclusion principle citations.

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

'Oh no, the box is drifting out into the harbor!' 'Yeah, I wouldn't worry about losing it.'

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

Plus, you have to control for the fact that some people are into being blindfolded.

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.

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

The Street View van isn't going to find out anything Google won't already know from reading my email.

Water/ice has a lot of weird phases. Maybe asking 'where do birds go when it rains' is like asking 'where does Clark Kent go whenever Superman shows up?'

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

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.

'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).

Ugh, it says they attempted delivery but "Nobody was home."

To generate #1 albums, 'jay --help' recommends the -z flag.

The article has twenty-three citations, one of which is an obscure manuscript from the 1490's and the other twenty-two are arguments on LanguageLog.

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.

This replaces the previous solar activity watch, which was issued last month when the sun took off its sunglasses.

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

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.

[later] I'm pleased to report we're now identifying and replacing hundreds of outdated metrics per hour.

Do I just leave money in my mailbox? How much? How much money do they need, anyway? I guess it probably depends how the economy is doing. If stocks go up, should I leave more money in my mailbox or less?

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!

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

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

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.

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

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

But THIS guy, he might be for real!

Good thing I'm not already prone to overthinking everyday decisions!

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

Old people used to write obnoxious thinkpieces about how people these days always wear watches and are slaves to the clock, but now they've switched to writing thinkpieces about how kids these days don't appreciate the benefits of an old-fashioned watch. My position is: The word 'thinkpiece' sounds like a word made up by someone who didn't know about the word 'brain'.

'Cheater!' 'Hey, gaming on wifi? You have only yourself to blame.'

You can do this one in every 30 times and still have 97% positive feedback.

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

This rumpled fabric at the corner looks like evidence of ongoing tectonic activity.

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

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

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

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.

My decal set has no adults, just a sea of hundreds of the little girl figures closing in around a single cat.

"Hey guys! I have a great idea for a migration!" "Dammit, Kevin."

"The police told me I can't be a doctor, but whenever they show up I just go into the Google Maps settings page I found and change the house to 'Police Headquarters' and then they have to do what I say."

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

It's going to be weird near the end of May when the screen goes blank for over 18 hours.

To get more knowledge

When putting his kids to bed, after saying 'Goodnight', Obama has to stop himself from saying 'God bless you, and God bless the United States of America.'

With reasonable assumptions about latitude and body shape, how much time might she gain them? Note: whatever the answer, sunrise always comes too soon. (Also, is it worth it if she throws up?)

A long time in the future, in a galaxy far, far, away, astronomers in the year 2008 sight an unusual gamma-ray burst originating from somewhere far across the universe.

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

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

Their Sun and gravity will make you, uh, something, I guess. Out of earshot from Earth, mostly.

I asked a few friends whether they'd had this happen, then looked up the popularity of their initials/names over time. Based on those numbers, it looks like there must be at least 750,000 people in the US alone who think 'Sure, that's probably my email address' on a regular basis.

Quick, fashion a climbing harness out of cat-6 cable and follow me down.

No one show this to Tycho's wife, okay?

In the aviation world, they don't use AM/PM times. Instead, all times are assumed to be AM unless they're labeled NOTAM.

They had BETTER make this a sample return mission.

Remember, the installer is watching the camera for the checksum it generated, so you have to scan it using your own phone.

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.

We trained it to produce data that looked convincing, and we have to admit the results look convincing!

Many things about Star Wars were not well planned out, but having a 37-year-old in old-age makeup play the Emperor in Return of the Jedi was such an incredible call.

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

There has long been debate about Big Bird's species, with some experts claiming he was a canary, but recent genetic analysis places him firmly in Cariamiformes.

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

The Mercator projection drastically distorts the size of almost every area of land except a small ring around the North and South Poles.

Also, I hear the 4th root of (9^2 + 19^2/22) is pi.

If only we'd chosen 1944-12-02 08:45:52 as the Unix epoch, we could've combined two doomsday scenarios into one and added a really boring scene to that Roland Emmerich movie.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"I think I'll pass. These days I have a hard time feeling comfortable in crowded bars with loud music and lots of shouting." --me, after the pandemic, but now for a second reason

"röntgen" and "rem" are 20th-century physics terms that mean "no trespassing."

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

Rome's declaration of war against Carthage was sent from a no-reply address, so Hannibal had to cross the Alps to deliver his "UNSUBSCRIBE" response in person.

You laugh to keep from crying, you do math to keep from crying . . .

As they're both unplugged, they do a lovely Daisy Daisy/Still Alive duet.

A term coined by my friend Beth

Hey, at least I ran out of staples.

I once made an anniversary card for my then-girlfriend with this layout.

[title-text similarly alphabetized]

I had some important research to do on proposed interstellar space missions, basketball statistics, canceled skyscrapers, and every article linked from "Women in warfare and the military in the 19th century."

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.

This plan may sound appealing to people who know a little about the immune system, but the drawbacks are clear to people who know a lot about the immune system and also to people who don't know anything about it.

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

Somewhere in the world, my actual grandmothers are reading this and angrily exclaiming that I never write even malformed thank-you notes. DEAR GRANDMOMS: I AM SORRY! YOU ARE WONDERFUL PEOPLE AND THANK YOU FOR EVERYTHING. LOVE reddit.com RANDALL.

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

Some say the world will end in fire; some say in segfaults.

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

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

'Whoa, twenty-two in two hours!' 'Your site got twenty-two hundred hits in two hours?' 'No. Twenty-two. But still, that's like half the people on the internet!'

In the LotR map, up and down correspond LOOSELY to northwest and southeast respectively.

I don't trust mantle/core geologists because I suspect that, if they ever get a chance to peel away the Earth's crust, they'll do it in a heartbeat.

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?

Oh, weird, Amazon is out of butterfly nets.

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

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

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

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

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

For decades I've been working off the accumulated rotation from one long afternoon on a merry-go-round when I was eight.

Fun game: try to post a YouTube comment so stupid that people realize you must be joking. (Hint: this is impossible)

Our experimental aerogel iceberg with helium pockets manages true 100% efficiency, barely touching the water, and it can even lift off of the surface and fly to more efficiently pursue fleeing hubristic liners.

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.

You were on the internet before I was born? Well, so was I.

Are you the annoying spoon or the sleepy spoon?

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

If enough people uphill decide to try the rolling strategy, they can make the decision for you.

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

Do YOU remember the skylight being this big?

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

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.

I don't know what's worse--the fact that after 15 years of using tar I still can't keep the flags straight, or that after 15 years of technological advancement I'm still mucking with tar flags that were 15 years old when I started.

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

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

There 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.

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

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

One good trick, if you get called on a fake service, is to build a working version of it and mention it again the next week.

My bracket was busted in the first round; I had Massachusetts v. Connecticut in the final, probably in a case over who gets to annex Rhode Island.

Attention all passengers: This is an express sequence to infinity. If your stop is not a power of two, please disembark now.

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

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

When comparing hypotheses with Bayesian methods, the similar 'clickbayes factor' can account for some harder-to-quantify priors.

Oh, your brother is Luke. Sorry, should've mentioned that first.

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

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

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

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

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

STUDENTS ARE CALLING PRESIDENT JOHNSON EN MASSE TO PROTEST THE BOMBING AND IT'S JAMMED THE WHITE HOUSE SWITCHBOARD. COULD THEY COLLAPSE OUR CRITICAL PHONE SYSTEMS? HAS THE FIRST TELEPHONE WAR BEGUN? STAY TUNED FOR MORE ON THIS DANGEROUS NEW TECHNOLOGY.

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

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.

CVE-2018-?????: It turns out Bruce Schneier is just two mischevious kids in a trenchcoat.

"I'm selling all my analogies at auction tomorrow, and that witch over there will give you 20 beans if you promise on pain of death to win them for her." "What if SEVERAL people promised witches they'd win, creating some kind of a ... squeeze? Gosh, you could make a lot of–" "Don't be silly! That probably never happens."

I'm glad to hear they're finally redefining the meter to be exactly three feet.

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

"The only link we've found between the two documents is that a fragment of the Noah one mentions Aaron's brother Moses parting an ocean. Is that right?" "... yes. Yes, exactly."

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

My optimizer uses content-aware inpainting to fill in all the wasted whitespace in the code, repeating the process until it compiles.

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

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

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

Life is too short for man pages, but occasionally much too short without them.

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

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

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.

It's commonly believed that Lorentz contraction makes objects appear flatter along the direction of travel. However, this ignores light travel times. In fact, a fast-moving butt would appear rotated toward the observer but not substantially distorted. Shakira was right.

Trains rotate the Earth around various axes while elevators shift its position in space.

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

[One hill over, a competing astrophotographer does a backflip over a commercial airliner while throwing a tray of plastic space stations into the air, through which a falcon swoops to 'grab' the real one.]

He also broke the streak that incumbents with websites are unbeatable and Delawareans can't win, creating a new precedent: Only someone from Delaware can defeat an incumbent with a website.

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

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

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

Frankly, I see no difference between thee and a summer's day. Only Ron Paul offers a TRUE alternative!

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

Evolutionarily speaking, mushrooms are technically a type of ghost.

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

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

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

Saturday is game night.

SOUND DOGS MAKE: [BARKING] [HISSING] [LIGHTSABER NOISES] [FLUENT ENGLISH] [SWEARING]

==COSMOLOGY==> 'Uhhh ... how sure are we that everything is made of these?'

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

At this point, if we're going to keep insisting on portraying dinosaurs as featherless because it's "cooler", it's time to apply that same logic to art involving bald eagles.

'Oh, hey Mom. No, nothing important, just at work.'

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.

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

Interpretations of the Hermeneutic Oath differ.

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

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

'Wow, that must be why you swallow so many of them per year!' 'No, that's spiders. You swallow WAY more ants.'

Sometimes, I sit on top of parking decks and watch the sun rise. I feel like I should have a guitar or something.

If this were SMBC, the alt-text drawing thingy would be a giraffe hooker fluttering her eyelashes.

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

I'm a big fan of Kurt Halsey

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

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

I was, at least at the start of this disastrous game night, your friend.

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".

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.

'Pour one out for precipitation data integrity,' I say, solemnly upending the glass into the rain gauge.

In months other than September, the 11th is mentioned substantially less often than any other date. It's been that way since long before 9/11 and I have no idea why.

Opening dialogue by Scott

Bacteria still outweigh us thousands to one--and that's not even counting the several pounds of them in your body.

Hey, before you go, can you explain to me what job I now have?

My favorite thing to do at parties is to talk judgmentally about people who aren't there.

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.

Several of the guests are secretly playing Meta Board Game Party. Every minute of parallel debate in the breakaway faction earns double victory points!

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

People often say that same-sex marriage now is like interracial marriage in the 60s. But in terms of public opinion, same-sex marriage now is like interracial marriage in the 90s, when it had already been legal nationwide for 30 years.

They've endowed a separate prize in Physiology or Medicine or Stopping Dr. Adams.

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

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

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

Films need to do this more, if only to piss off the people who have to feed it into the projector.

Type IIII error: Mistaking tally marks for Roman numerals

First person to bring me Wayne Coyne in a hamster ball gets a free t-shirt! He gets one too.

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.

If you have an old phone in a drawer, and you listen very carefully, you can occasionally hear the occasional tap of an emitted SIM card hitting the side of the drawer as the phone transmutes to a lower-end model.

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

I have never been lied to by data in a .txt file which has been hand-aligned.

'Thank you for the loveliest evening I've ever had...' [normal] '...east of the Mississippi.' [instant intrigue!]

If you pick a low enough orbit, it gives you a lot of freedom to use a lightweight launch vehicle such as a stepladder.

StackSort connects to StackOverflow, searches for 'sort a list', and downloads and runs code snippets until the list is sorted.

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.

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

The Range Mischief Officer has modified the trajectory to add a single random spin somewhere in the flight, but won't tell us where.

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

Canada's travel restrictions on the US are 99% about keeping out COVID and 1% about keeping out people who say 'pod.'

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

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

President Andrew Johnson once said, "If I am to be shot at, I want Gnome Ann to be in the way of the bullet."

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

Ground-pole-ball-pole can be fun if you shake the first pole to get the second one whipping around dangerously, but the ball at the joint gets torn apart pretty fast.

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

The company tried to document how often employees were celebrating Software Testing Day, but their recordkeeping system kept mysteriously crashing.

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).

On the news a few days later: "Buzz is building around the so-called 'camping Roomba' after a big investment. Preorders have spiked, and..."

CLIMAX is good, but SEXCLIMAX is even better.

If you're interested in the subject, Lawrence Lessig's 'Free Culture' is pretty good

She's pretty sharp when provoked.

The real loser in an argument about the meaning of the word 'hoverboard' is anyone who leaves that argument on foot.

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

And 0.002 dollars will NEVER equal 0.002 cents.

Alexa defeated her in a battle hinging on the ability to set multiple timers.

Wait, what do you mean, 'dark matter'? It's not dark, it interacts with high-energy gamma rays ... right? Oh jeez, did I forget to make it interact?

"Oh my God, why did you scotch-tape a bunch of hammers together?" "It's ok! Nothing depends on this wall being destroyed efficiently."

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

But the windows! What if there's a voyeur watchi-- wait, now I'm turned on too.

Ok, so Spirit and Opportunity are pretty awesome. And Kepler. And New Horizons, Cassini, Curiosity, TiME, and Project M. But c'mon, if the Earth were a basketball, in 40 years no human's been more than half an inch from the surface.

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

Another option: "It is an honor to be the first human to set foot on the moon."

I'm only willing to visit placid lakes, salt flats, and painting exhibits until the world's 3D technology improves.

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

It comes with a certificate of authenticity, which comes with a certificate of authenticity, which comes with a...

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

Oh no, they set up a roadblock which is just a sign with the entire 'Czech hedgehog' article printed on it.

"Okay, for the last time, the shot is free, so we can't--" "Shut up and take my money!"

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

If anyone calls you on any weird detail, just say it's from the Jedi Prince book series, which contains so much random incongruous stuff that even most Expanded Universe/Legends fans collectively agreed to forget about it decades ago.

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

"Some people say light is waves, and some say it's particles, so I bet light is some in-between thing that's both wave and particle depending on how you look at it. Am I right?" "YES, BUT YOU SHOULDN'T BE!"

"I know it seems impossible, but the trick is that I sailed in here when I was very young."

What's the complexity class of the best linear programming cutting-plane techniques? I couldn't find it anywhere. Man, the Garfield guy doesn't have these problems ...

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

The flags were probably vaporized on impact, because we launched it before we had finished figuring out how to land. That makes sense from an engineering standpoint, but also feels like a metaphor.

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!

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.

Speed limit c arcminutes^2 per steradian

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.

I actually kind of feel like John and Surf King wouldn't like each other, which is a lot to unpack.

I'm not sure if this is actually true

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.

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

The great thing is, the sentence is really just a reminder to the listener to worry about whatever aspects of the technology they're already feeling alarmist about, which in their mind gives you credit for addressing their biggest anxieties.

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

Later, at home: 'Dear diary: Still can't figure out what to write here ...'

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

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

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

The pile gets soaked with data and starts to get mushy over time, so it's technically recurrent.

Of course, you don't wanna limit yourself to the strict forms of the meter. That could get pretty difficult.

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

Detectives say the key to tracking down the source of the kites was a large wall map covered in thumbtacks and string. 'It's the first time that method has ever actually worked,' said a spokesperson.

Maybe I should let up on Megatokyo a little?

To get serious analyses of hurricanes and oil slicks, see Jeff Masters' blog. To get serious discussions of worst-case scenario thinking, see Bruce Schneier's blog. To get enough Vitamin D, don't read any blogs and go outside instead.

Getting the utility people to run transmission lines to Earth is expensive, but it will pay for itself in no time.

I like to think that somewhere out there, there's someone whose personal quest is lobbying TV providers to add an option to switch their on-screen keyboards to Dvorak.

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

Subgroup analysis is ongoing.

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

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

Also, is it just me, or do Japan and New Zealand look suspiciously similar? Has anyone seen them at a party together?

They'd convince me to come out of retirement for one last job: biting into a giant lump of slightly soft wax a couple of times.

I wish I knew how to quit this so I wouldn't have to quit you.

'Touch!' 'Nope, I sighed and stared at you with resignation, so I regained emotional right-of-way.'

The LINACs in the glasses frames can barely manage one MeV. You should've gone to the screening at CERN.

Not enough houses on your block? Just hit them at 30-year intervals from here to 2300 and get 10x the candy.

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

Perhaps you need a crash course in taking hints. Here's your first lesson: We're not actually walking somewhere together; I'm trying to leave this conversation and you're following me.

'Come to what?' 'You. Me. This moment.'

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

If the flyers don't work, we'll switch to the LEAST subtle method of informing a town of the existence of a trebuchet club.

For many of the anatomy pictures on Wikipedia, I think this is actually not far from reality. They only look all formal and professional due to careful cropping.

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

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.

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

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

This is silly, of course. The enemy will be born in the network.

I dropped my phone while trying to search, and I tried to unlock it from up here, so can you also search for screen repair places?

They'll pick music and culture that they know annoys you. Building in behavioral easter eggs is a fair retaliation!

There's been a raccoon accident at an accordion bacchanalia! Double doses!

1. Nf3 ... ↘↘↘ 2. Nc3 ... ↘↘↘ 0-1

Umwelt is the idea that because their senses pick up on different things, different animals in the same ecosystem actually live in very different worlds. Everything about you shapes the world you inhabit--from your ideology to your glasses prescription to your web browser.

Proper User Policy apparently means Simon Says.

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

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

Coconuts are so far down to the left they couldn't be fit on the chart. Ever spent half an hour trying to open a coconut with a rock? Fuck coconuts.

The sudden introduction of Venusian flowers led to an explosive growth of unusual Earth pollinators, which became known as the "butterfly effect."

First comes blood / Then we perish / Then comes Death in his Eternity Carriage.

We have met the enemy and he is us.

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

I was really impressed by the accuracy of some of the report's predictions about fossil fuel consumption. Then I realized, oh, right, of course.

I've never been that big of a hug person, but it turns out I'm not quite this small of a hug person either.

Aww, the oceanic crust and the continental crust are getting married!

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

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.

I'm pretty sure I've logged more hours in Google Maps over the past decade than in any game.

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

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

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

Massage: Theoretical (10), Quantum (6), High-energy (2), Computational (1), Marine (1), Astro- (None)

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

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

I also have an utterance. Less of an utterance and more of an incantation. Less of an incantation and more of a malediction. Less of a malediction and more of a Word of Power. Less of a Word of Power and more of an Unforgivable Curse.

Wait, sorry, I got mixed up--he's actually almost 50. It's the kid from The Karate Kid who just turned 40.

We can do this.

Fortunately, the charging one has been solved now that we've all standardized on mini-USB. Or is it micro-USB? Shit.

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

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

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

Contains the active ingredients from all competing cold medicines, plus the medicines for headaches, arthritis, insomnia, indigestion, and more, because who wants THOSE things?

Too good not to happen.

If I really focus, I can distinguish between John Steinbeck and John Updike, or between Gore Vidal and Vidal Sassoon, but not both at once.

The one time I tried, I got hit by a slinky going down at double speed.

Our retina display features hundreds of pixels per inch in the central fovea region.

Any time I misspell a word it's just because I have too much integrity to copy answers from the dictionary.

It's sad seeing those videos of turbine blade being torn apart in high winds, but it's the only way they can disperse their seeds.

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

Obviously battery technology and prices have driven a lot of the scooter explosion, but I feel like Dean Kamen must be at least a little grumpy about how much people laughed at the idea of the Segway.

Our grant application contains one of those little greeting card speakers that plays spaceship noises when you open it.

And I could replace you with older pictures of you, from back when you looked happy.

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

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

Who can forget the early 2010s memes? 'You know you're a 90s kid if you remember the feeling of warm sunlight on your face.' 'Only 90s kids remember the dawn.'

I mean, the black-and-white stuff was running backward, but it hardly mattered to the story.

It was tricky.

Other pollsters complain about declining response rates, but our poll showed that 96% of respondents would be 'somewhat likely' or 'very likely' to agree to answer a series of questions for a survey.

I tried to train an AI to repair my Python environment but it kept giving up and deleting itself.

When speaking out loud, you can can call it the 'Perseids meatier shower' and no one will ever know. (If you do get caught somehow, just tell them to Google the 'Kentucky meat shower' and that will distract them while you escape.)

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

Science joke. You should probably just move along.

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

Romantic comedy heroines, I'm talking to you.

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.

Mathematicians give a third answer on the vertical axis, "That question is poorly defined, but we have a sub-field devoted to every plausible version of it."

Also, it's not like anyone actually calls up the Nobel committee to double-check things.

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

The strongest incentive we have to develop faster-than-light travel is that it would let us apologize in advance.

If you don't have an extension cord I can get that too. Because we're friends! Right?

Officer suspended from horse.

Works for any grocery or non-grocery. Even thyme is just H and time.

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.

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

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

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

The bug report was marked 'could not reproduce'.

m-x machineofdeath-mode

I'm looking forward to having to worry a lot less about covid, but wouldn't mind if we worried a little more about giving each other colds. Colds are bad!

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.

Theranos partnership: Sorry, we know, but we signed the contract back before all the stuff and the lawyers say we can't back out, so just try to keep your finger away from the bottom of the phone.

No way, we gotta rewind and cross-reference this map with the list of coordinates we saw on the other screen. This Greenland thing could be big.

'Smilodon fatalis' narrowly edged out 'Tyrannosaurus rex' to win this year's Most Badass Latin Names competition, after edging out 'Dracorex hogwartsia' and 'Stygimoloch spinifer' (meaning 'horned dragon from the river of death') in the semifinals.

I wish I'd missed you then so I wouldn't be missing you now

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

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

The value of n is still unknown, but new results constrain it to fall between 8 and 10^500, ruling out popular 'n=1' and 'n=2' theories.

Mrs. Roberts would have gotten up sooner, of course, but she was busy piping find ~ and find ~nomad into xargs shred, just in case.

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

That helmet won't save him.