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

Listen, in a few thousand years you'll invent a game called 'SimCity' which has a 'disaster' button, and then you'll understand.

Although the Markov chain-style text model is still rudimentary; it recently gave me "Massachusetts Institute of America". Although I have to admit it sounds prestigious.

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

Yet one more reason I'm barred from speaking at crypto conferences.

I have to pay with paper money.

So, um. Do you want to get a drink after the game?

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

This site requires Sun Java 6.0.0.1 (32-bit) or higher. You have Macromedia Java 7.3.8.1¾ (48-bit). Click here [link to java.com main page] to download an installer which will run fine but not really change anything.

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

I pronounce epitome "EPPY-tome", but EpiPen "uh-PIE-pen".

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

Maybe I should let up on Megatokyo a little?

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

For a while, some physicists worked on a theory unifying the other forces with both the force of gravity and the film "Gravity," but even after Alfonso Cuarón was held in a deep underground chamber of water for 10^31 years he refused to sell his film to Disney.

Bruce Schneier believes safewords are fundamentally insecure and recommends that you ask your partner to stop via public key signature.

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.

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.'

Asimov's Cosmic AC was created by linking all datacenters through hyperspace, which explains a lot. It didn't reverse entropy--it just discarded the universe when it reached end-of-life and ordered a new one.

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

Haha, you'll see!

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

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

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

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

You can identify them ahead-of-time -- they lead with their left foot when the music starts.

David did this

Family going to bed at 10 PM is so much worse than jet lag.

If you think THAT'S unethical, you should see the stuff we approved via our Placebo IRB.

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

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

♫ When the spacing is tight / And the difference is slight / That's a moiré ♫

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.

It's easy to regret your awkward conversations but hard to regret the ones you didn't have.

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

Geometry textbooks always try to trick you by adding decorative stripes and dotted lines.

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

What'll I say -- "I was staring at some cat vomit when I got the news?"

Unfortunately, body size and bite force continue to increase.

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

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

I think you could get up to about 11:59:57 before you'd have trouble swallowing the chocolates fast enough. At that point, you'd need some kind of a liquify-and-chug apparatus to get up over the 11:59:59 barrier. Anyway, Merry Christmas!

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

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.

Earth's r_jf is approximately 1.5 light-days, leading to general relativity's successful prediction that all the frogs in the Solar System should be found collected on the surface of the Earth.

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

We didn't actually land on the moon -- it just looked like we did because of precession. Also, gyroscopes caused 9/11.

I'm trying to get the page locked because some jerk keeps adding "Yachts".

I wrote 20 short programs in Python yesterday. It was wonderful. Perl, I'm leaving you.

The interactive experience is built on a single theological framework that unites Dante, George R. R. Martin, every major heist movie, and Erin Gloria Ryan's "Kevin is dead" Home Alone theory.

'I see you're in this mood again.' 'I am always in this mood.'

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

'Wait, why would you think a movie set in 1984 would do drive-ins as a retro promotion?' 'You know, 80s stuff. Drive-in movies. Britney Spears doing the hustle. Elvis going on Ed Sullivan and showing off his pog collection.' 'What year were you born, again?'

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

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

Things are rarely just crazy enough to work, but they're frequently just crazy enough to fail hilariously.

The Super Bowl is actually an elaborate ruse, concocted by a shadowy group in the mid sixties for this purpose. The 'watch it for the ads' addition was a master stroke.

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

I'm working to bring about a superintelligent AI that will eternally torment everyone who failed to make fun of the Roko's Basilisk people.

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

Fire is actually a potential biosignature, since it means something is filling the atmosphere with an unstable gas like oxygen. If we find a planet covered in flames, it might be an indicator that it supports life. Or used to, anyway, before the fire.

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

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

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

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

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.

I'm SO glad I escaped. They almost had me caught in their weird ... thing.

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

Shoot, it landed in the golf course. Gonna be hard to get it down the--oh, never mind, it rolled onto the ice hazard. Face-off!

What an incredible smell you've discovered.

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

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

Officer suspended from horse.

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

Cloud computing has a ways to go.

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

Tag yourself, I'm "frayed."

ALERT: Human 910-25J-1Q38 has created a Youtube channel. Increase erratic jerkiness of flying by 30% until safely out of range.

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

The real key was inventing the windmill-powered winch.

It's much better than the other one.

The full analysis is of course much more complicated, but I can't stay to talk about it because I have a date.

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.

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

For $5 I promise not to orchestrate this situation, and for $25 I promise not to take further advantage of this ability to create incentives.

I'm trying to build character but Eclipse is really confusing.

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

If a wild bun is sighted, a nice gesture of respect is to send a 'BUN ALERT' message to friends and family, with photographs documenting the bun's location and rank. If no photographs are possible, emoji may be substituted.

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

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

This only makes it more urgent that we adopt my roadmap for the next 10 years, which should put us solidly in the lead.

10^13.4024: A person who has come back to numbers after a journey deep into some random theoretical field

My goal in life is to be personally responsible for at least one sports rule change.

On the other hand, poor Samara -- transcoded to FLV. No one deserves that.

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

I'm always installing tons of weird experimental keyboards because it serves as a good reminder that nothing I was going to type was really worth the trouble.

I hate how the media only ever uses the first part of this quote, stripping it of its important context.

It traveled so far to reach me. I owed it my best.

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

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

Someone should really bring them a ladder and remind them to build the Endless Stair *first* next time.

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

Real analysis is way realer than I expected.

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.

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

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."

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

It's science!

The Piña Colada song carves a trajectory across the chart over the course of the song.

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.

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

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

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

Wait, no, that one also loses. How about a nice game of chess?

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.

Speed Limit: 45 MPH / Minimum: 65 MPH

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

Don't you know? The chances of a random object being a scone are about one in six.

Of course, I sort all my bookshelves the normal way, alphabetically (by first sentence).

I was going to get you an alarm clock that occasionally goes off randomly in the middle of the night, but you can ignore it and go back to sleep and it's fine.

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

We can't let this happen again. We need to build a secure TWO-day-before-retirement safe room.

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

Because they orbit the Earth every 90 minutes, some astronauts should try to argue that, due to CDC regulations and time zone technicalities, they should be able to get their second dose just 30 or 40 hours after their first.

'Big Data' doesn't just mean increasing the font size.

We need a special holiday to honor the countless kind souls with unsecured networks named 'linksys'.

Freestyle rapping is basically applied Markov chains.

'Dude, wait -- I'm not American! So my risk is basically zero!'

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

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

Normally, the Shuttle can't quite safely reach the orbital inclination required to pass over both those points from a Canaveral launch, but this is an alternate history in which either it launches from Vandenberg or everyone hates the Outer Banks.

I live on a torn-bag-of-potato-chips-where-the-tear-is-rapidly-growing fault, which is terrifying.

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

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

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

I used to do this all the time.

GO FOR LUNCH, REPEAT, GO FOR LUNCH.

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

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.

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

Once, long ago, I saw this girl go by. I didn't stop and talk to her, and I've regretted it ever since.

Hey, so did you ever finish your video series about Cassie and the caterpillar morph? I loved the first three, but never ... no, sorry, I get it, this isn't the place. Sorry! Sorry.

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'

At least they're not alone down there.

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

Protip: You can win every exchange just by being one level more precise than whoever talked last. Eventually, you'll defeat all conversational opponents and stand alone.

Thanks to differences in logging regulations, the messages actually turned out to be visible from the air.

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

Despite having now taken three months longer than the airplane people, we're making disappointingly little progress toward the obvious next stage of vehicle: The Unobtanium-hulled tunneling ship from the 2003 film 'The Core.'

"Confirmed, we have to scrub." "Ugh, okay. I'll get the bucket and sponge."

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

'No, my cabbage moths have already started laying eggs in them! Send the trolley into the river!' 'No, the sailing wolf will steal the boat to rescue them!'

I was thinking of observing stars to verify Einstein's theory of relativity again, but I gotta say, that thing is looking pretty solid at this point.

See also: Farm animals and dinosaurs. I am so confident that there exists children's media that involves dinosaurs driving trucks on a farm that I'm writing this without even Googling to check.

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

Don't worry, the dogs are all fine. That's actually kind of the problem.

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

Now, you may argue that the varying hour lengths and feedback effects would cause chaos. To which I say, yeah, and I'm also curious to see how the weekday cycle interacts with it! So, you in?

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

But one of the regulars in the channel is a girl!

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

fMRI testing showed that subjects who don't agree to participate are much more likely to escape from the machine mid-scan.

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

The misguided search for a perpetual motion machine has run substantially longer than any attempted perpetual motion machine.

Congratulations to whoever wished for revenge on a forest near the Tunguska River, a 1980 Chevy Malibu in Peekskill NY, Alabama resident Ann Hodges, every building in Chelyabinsk with glass windows, and the non-avian dinosaurs.

The best thing about Strunk/White fanfiction is that it's virtually guaranteed to be well written.

OpenStreetMap was always pretty good but is also now *really* good? And Apple Maps's new zoomed-in design in certain cities like NYC and London is just gorgeous. It's cool how there are all these good maps now!

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

General solutions get you a 50% tip.

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

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.

[Earlier, at the eye doctor] 'No, for the last time, the numerals on the paper aren't my prescription, it's the shape I want you to make with the laser.'

You know what they say--if you don't like the weather here in the Solar System, just wait five billion years.

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

Superman lies near the bird/plane boundary over a range of distances, which explains the confusion.

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

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

No, tell the park rangers to calm down, it's fine--I put a screen on the front. I just want to get the birds a little closer.

Also, they're getting increasingly worried that someone will accidentally hit the 'retract' button, and that the end of the cable thrashing around as it winds up could devastate the Earth's surface.

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

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

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

I need a lawn, so I can yell at kids to stay off it.

Both arXiv and archive.org are invaluable projects which, if they didn't exist, we would dismiss as obviously ridiculous and unworkable.

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

I love Brussels Sprouts Mandela Effect; I saw them open for Correct Horse Battery Staple.

Type IIII error: Mistaking tally marks for Roman numerals

The symbol for degrees Felsius is an average of the Euro symbol (€) and the Greek lunate epsilon (ϵ).

And nothing for 'I'm glad I saw Epic Movie.'

[shouted, from the field] 'Aunt Beast hit a pop fly to second! Dive for it, Mrs Whatsit!'

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

An idling gas engine may be annoyingly loud, but that's the price you pay for having WAY less torque available at a standstill.

A term coined by my friend Beth

::click:: Come back! You didn't see the one of Whistler's mother!

Luckily for my interpretation, no precincts were won by the Green Party.

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

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

Cyanobacteria wiped out nearly all life on Earth once before, and they can do it again!

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

I occasionally do this with mile markers on the highway.

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

You can still do powerline networking, but the bitrate does drop a little depending on the lightbulb warmup and cooldown delay.

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

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

The worst part is when sidewalk cracks are out-of-sync with your natural stride.

Inflationary cosmologists call all music from after the first 10^-30 seconds "post-"

Oh, and, uh, if the Russian government asks, that submarine was always there.

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

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

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

That seems like an awful lot of hassle when all I wanted was a cool sword.

Chuck Jones is a vengeful god.

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

Not only is that terrible in general, but you just KNOW Billy's going to open the root present first, and then everyone will have to wait while the heap is rebuilt.

The academic archaeology establishment is suppressing my breakthroughs because of the disruption it would bring to their prepared-core flake-based toolmaking industry.

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

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

But the rind is where all the vitamins are!

ACCESS LIMITS: Clients may maintain connections to the server for no more than 86,400 seconds per day. If you need additional time, you may contact IERS to file a request for up to one additional second.

Check it out; I've had sex with someone who's had sex with someone who's written a paper with Paul Erdős!

I don't dig pit traps and cover them with sticks and a thin layer of leaves nearly as much as I expected; I find a chance to do it barely once a month.

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

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

Damn. Not only did he not install it, he sutured a 'Vista-Ready' sticker onto my arm.

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

AAAAAA A ÃA̧AȂA̦ ǍÅÂÃĀÁȂ AAAAAAA!

The Python environmental protection agency wants to seal it in a cement chamber, with pictorial messages to future civilizations warning them about the danger of using sudo to install random Python packages.

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

There, I showed you it.

'The world's greatest [whatever]' is subjective, but 'One of the world's greatest [whatever]s' is clearly objective. Anyway, that's why I got you this 'one of the world's greatest moms' mug!

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

Fuck it. I'm just going to Waffle House.

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.

Though please do confirm that it's actually *me* on Klout first, and not one of my friends trying to get me punched. The great thing about this douchebag deadman switch is that I will never dare trigger it.

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.

It's depressing how many of these are real shirts

Saying 'what kind of an idiot doesn't know about the Yellowstone supervolcano' is so much more boring than telling someone about the Yellowstone supervolcano for the first time.

I think I see a Mandelbrot set! No, that's just blood splatters. Golly.

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.

Shipping times vary. Same-ocean delivery may only take a few years, but delivery from the Weddell Sea in Antarctica may take multiple decades, and molecules meant for inland seas like the Mediterranean may be returned as undeliverable by surface currents.

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

It's not far from the sign marking the exact latitude and longitude of the Earth's core.

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'.

West Norsussex is east of East Norwessex, but they're both far north of Middlesex and West Norwex.

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

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

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

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

As a first step, they can put in a secondary deck, to help drivers try it out and find out how fun the jumps are. After a while no one will use the old flat deck and they can remove it.

In addition to having all their budgets in a spreadsheet with consistent formatting, they just love expressing preferences on a well-calibrated numerical scale.

Oh, I think this word might mean 'Crisco'!

HOW ABOUT A NICE GAME OF STRIP GLOBAL THERMONUCLEAR WAR?

The last band of color indicates the snake's tolerance for being held before biting.

People tell me I have too much time on my hands, but really the problem is that there's too much time, PERIOD.

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?)

Our phones must have great angular momentum sensors because the compasses really suck.

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

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

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.

The Credible Machine

No one likes my novelty ringtone, an audio recording of a phone on vibrate sitting on a hard surface.

Hey! No running in the back-arc basin!

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

A whirlpool!

Listen, you need to get over your reluctance to permanently alter a game. Now roll 2d6 to determine how many ounces of soda to spill into the box.

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

New phone OS features: Infinite customization (home screen icons no longer snap to grid), dark mode (disables screen), screaming mode (self-explanatory), and coherent ultracapacitor-pumped emission (please let us know what this setting does; we've been afraid to try it).

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

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

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

Instead of bobcat, package contained chair.

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

I hope no automatic doors I know read this. I would be so embarrassed.

Aaron Sorkin has been tapped to write the TV movie about the aging prince's eventual election to Pat Toomey's Senate seat, currently titled either 'FRESHman Senator' or 'Mr. Smith Goes to Washington'.

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.

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

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

It's ok, I still have some nice, cool gas clouds that aren't collapsing. As long as nothing ionizes them, I can continue to enjoy their ... HEY! NO!!!

Wait, that second one is a woman? ... wait, if that bothers me, then why doesn't ... man, this game is no fun anymore.

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

Spherical or parabolic reflectors would of course lead to aberrant behavior.

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

It was finally destroyed with a nuclear weapon carrying the destructive energy of the Hiroshima bomb.

How could anyone consider themselves a well-rounded adult without a basic understanding of silicate geochemistry? Silicates are everywhere! It's hard to throw a rock without throwing one!

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

Of all the nations, the armies of the ununoctium-benders are probably the least intimidating. The xenon-benders come close, but their flickery signs are at least effective for propaganda.

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

Conveniently for everyone, it turns out that dark energy is produced by subterranean parasitoid wasps.

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

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

Opening dialogue by Scott

Space-time is like some simple and familiar system which is both intuitively understandable and precisely analogous, and if I were Richard Feynman I'd be able to come up with it.

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

More generally, with great power comes great dEnergy/dt.

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.

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

"Radians Fahrenheit or radians Celsius?" "Uh, sorry, gotta go!"

This also guarantees he won't be one of the ones to get a bobcat.

The #2 cause of astronomer hand injuries is trying to do vector math when the second axis points off to the right.

Hell if I know

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

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

"This one is perfect in every way, except that for some reason it's woven from a tungsten mesh, so it weighs 85 pounds and I'll need to carry it around on a hand cart." "That seems like a bad--" "BUT IT HAS THE PERFECT POCKET ARRANGEMENT!"

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

Due to a minor glitch, 'discharge patient' does not cause the algorithm to exit, but instead leads back to 'hunt down and capture patient'.

I have never seen a work of fiction so perfectly capture the out-of-nowhere shock of discovering that you've just bricked something important because you didn't pay enough attention to a loose wire.

Once you've done this, make a note of how old they were. Then, when their age reaches double that, show them this chart again.

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

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

The worst is being teased by responsible, mask-wearing teens. They even spritz the hamster ball with disinfectant before rolling it, carefully avoiding the filter vents.

No more, no less

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

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

Squaring the circle is really easy with some good clamps.

Biologically speaking, what we call a 'snake' is actually a human digestive tract which has escaped from its host.

I was banned from the airliners.net photography forum by concerned moderators after the end of my lens started brushing against planes as they flew by.

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

But THIS guy, he might be for real!

$Jill and Jack / began to frack. / The oil boosts their town. / But fractures make / the bedrock shake / and Jack came tumbling down.$

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).

Hit Turing right in the test-ees.

You may point out that this very retreat into ironic detachment while still clearly participating in the thing in question is the very definition of contemporary hipsterdom. But on the other hand, wait, you're in an empty room. Who are you talking to?

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

It's pi plus C, of course.

They all made fun of Autometalogolex, but someday there will be a problem with Christmas that can only be solved if Santa somehow gets a serious headache, and then they'll see.

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.

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 once worked on a friend's dad's computer. He had the hard drive divided into six partitions, C: through J:, with a 'Documents' directory tree on each one. Each new file appeared to be saved to a partition at random. I knew enough not to ask.

And to you, I leave my life-sized ice sculpture replica of the Pietà which was blessed by the Pope. You must never let it melt! Now, remember, all gifts must be removed from my estate within 24 hours.

Dad, where is Grandpa right now?

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

$On the other hand, the refractor's limited light-gathering means it's unable to make out shadow people or the dark god Chernabog.$

We're like 10+ movies in and the focus has been almost entirely on the WARS half.

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

The question with Lucy and the football was always whether, on some level, she believed the things she said.

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

Saturday is game night.

People get really grumpy when they realize you're giving them directions for how to go to the store and buy a GPS.

'The sad thing is that I just wanted to talk about your poor smoke-bomb techniques.'

Also possibly several miles beyond that.

Although not permanently.

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

For the moment it's a standoff

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

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

The same people who spend their weekends at the Blogger Reenactment Festivals will whine about the anachronisms in historical movies, but no one else will care.

"While I try to do my part to destroy the environment, I try not to focus too much on individual responsibility. By pushing for broad policy changes, we can collectively do far more damage to the biosphere than any of us could on our own."

I get that there are security reasons for the schedule, but this is like the ONE problem we have where the right answer is both easy and straightforward. If we can't figure it out, maybe we should just give up and just replace all the portraits on the bills with that weird pyramid eye thing.

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

What are all these less-than signs? What's an HREF? Look, we know you live in a fancy futuristic tech world, but not all of us have upgraded to the latest from Sun Microsystems.

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.

'But what's the buzz about the film?' 'We're hoping it's distracting.'

We're working to make sure the images are as up-to-date and accurate as possible, with a minimum number of sponsored galaxies.

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

Bugs are spin 1/2 particles, unless it's particularly windy.

I guess I should be signing stuff, but I've never been sure what to sign. Maybe if I post my private key, I can crowdsource my decisions about what to sign.

Psychology researchers say our 'flashbulb' memories of big events can be unreliable, but I clearly remember watching live on CNN as Challenger crashed into and destroyed the Berlin Wall.

Constantly stopping these briefings halfway through is becoming a pain.

Inappropriate places for the Penis Game include baby showers and terrorist attacks

She's pretty sharp when provoked.

/bu|[rn]t|[coy]e|[mtg]a|j|iso|n[hl]|[ae]d|lev|sh|[lnd]i|[po]o|ls/ matches the last names of elected US presidents but not their opponents.

You should talk to the girl down the hall; I think you'd like her. Lemme know if you find out why she's ordering all those colored plastic balls.

[Dog returns with the end of a string in its mouth] [Voice drifts down from the sky] Kites are fun!

It's cool how, when there's a number lots of people are curious about, but which isn't easy to measure, some random guess will get cited everywhere and become the universally quoted value. Unrelatedly, did you know there are 850 trillion waves in the ocean?

Ever notice how there aren't as many thunderstorms now as there were when you were a kid? Much like 'the shuffle on my MP3 player has a bias', this is occasionally true but universally believed. Brains are so interesting!

If physics had a mafia, I'm pretty sure the BICEP2 mess would have ended in bloodshed.

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

In the 60s, Marvin Minsky assigned a couple of undergrads to spend the summer programming a computer to use a camera to identify objects in a scene. He figured they'd have the problem solved by the end of the summer. Half a century later, we're still working on it.

And from that day on, I wore this little 'F' key pendant everywhere I went.

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.

And a different ghost has replaced me in the bedroom.

2060: The gregarious superintelligent AI, happily talking its way out of a box, is fast becoming a relic of the past. Today's quantum hyper-beings are too busy with their internal multiverse sims to even notice that they're in boxes at all!

It's like they say, you gotta fight fire with clichés.

Biologists play reverse Pokémon, trying to avoid putting any one team member on the front lines long enough for the experience to cause evolution.

Well, for some value of 'actually work'.

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

Thank you to Gretchen McCulloch for fielding this question, and sorry that as a result the world's foremost internet linguist has been devoured by the brown one. She will be missed.

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

"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."

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

One perk of being born at 0.88c is that your birthday is over two days long.

I know hand dryers have their problems, but I think for fun we should keep egging Dyson on and see if we can get them to make one where the airflow breaks the speed of sound.

Nearby, there were also no injuries when a multi-vortex tornado hit one of those spinning teacup rides.

I can't speak for your other subjects, but MY motion was as smooth and natural as the framerate allowed.

Oh dang, you have to pay? Hey, has anyone else paid already? If so, can I borrow your phone for a sec?

"Symbolic integration" is when you theatrically go through the motions of finding integrals, but the actual result you get doesn't matter because it's purely symbolic.

To ensure lasting immunity, doctors recommend destroying a second Death Star some time after the first.

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

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.

Concealed mostly beneath the surface, sharks are the icebergs of the sea.

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

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

Don't expect any leniency on late fees, though.

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'.

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

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.

What's that? You think I don't like the Peters map because I'm uncomfortable with having my cultural assumptions challenged? Are you sure you're not ... ::puts on sunglasses:: ... projecting?

Hey! A bunch of the early Cretaceous fossils on each coast seem to have been plagiarized, too!

Dear Peter Wiggin: This letter is to inform you that you have received enough upvotes on your reddit comments to become president of the world. Please be at the UN tomorrow at 8:00 sharp.