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

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It took a lot of booster rockets, but luckily Amazon had recently built thousands of them to bring Amazon Prime same-day delivery to the Moon colony.

Support your local paper, unless it's just been bought by some sinister hedge fund or something, which it probably has.

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

The choices we make Tuesday could have MASSIVE and PERMANENT effects on the charts on Nate Silver's blog!

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

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

I laugh at the software as if I'm 100% confident that it's 2019.

Of course, since their cautionary tale was reported in a print newspaper, no one read it.

This one makes me wince every time I think about it

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

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

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

'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.

Someday I just know I'm going to encounter a problem that requires 500 flashlights and 700 knives with weird holes in them, and on that day I won't be caught unprepared.

Kind of rude of them to simultaneously issue an EVACUATION - IMMEDIATE alert, a SHELTER IN PLACE alert, and a 911 TELEPHONE OUTAGE alert.

Ultimately, history would imperfectly record the story of the Foal of Troy.

CIRCULAR VIDEO - PROS: Solves aspect ratio problem. CONS: Never trust anyone who talks to you from inside a circle.

RIP, Gary.

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

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

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.

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

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

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!

Why can't you have normal existential angst like all the other boys?

[Six months later] "Well, our 'worst ladder' subscription series was a surprisingly lucrative success, but was completely canceled out by the losses from the disastrous Home Depot merchandising tie-in."

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.

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

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

'Why on Earth would someone commit air piracy just to finance a terrible movie decades later?' 'People are very strange these days.'

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

Awww.

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

100 years later, this story remains terrifying--not because it's the local network block, but because the killer is still on IPv4.

Snowy blizzards are fun, but so are warm sunny beaches, so we split the difference by having lots of icy wet slush!

A medicine that makes you put two dots over your letters more often is a diäretic.

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

It's easier to be an asshole to words than to people.

It maintains odor levels in a normal familiar range, so if you open the windows and the air gets too fresh, it filters it through some dirty laundry samples to compensate.

It's true, I think about this all the time.

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

If a materials scientist gives you a present, always ask whether regifting will incur any requirements for Federal paperwork.

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

I don't understand the things you do, and you therefore may represent an interaction with the quantum vacuum virtual plasma.

And the baby has a fever.

Plus the reaction in the Tumblverse is always 'repeatedly get hit by a dog and fall down the stairs'.

I'm waiting for the day when, if you tell someone 'I'm from the internet', instead of laughing they just ask 'oh, what part?'

And of course I had to redo this like three times because I kept writing 'UNTIE'; I kept doing 'doing 'doing it wrong' wrong' wrong.

If you can't get your graphing tool to do the shading, just add some clip art of cosmologists discussing the unusual curvature of space in the area.

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

I'm the Philosopher until someone hands me a burrito.

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

Hey, why do YOU get to be the president of Tautology Clu-- wait, I can guess.

Disgusting

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

The two best reasons to get into fossils are booping trilobites and getting to say the word "fossiliferous" a lot.

In Rio de Janeiro in 2016, the same jump will get an athlete 0.25% higher (>1cm) than in London four years prior.

Don't turn it on.

If you think curiosity without rigor is bad, you should see rigor without curiosity.

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.

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

That one is a variable star which pulses every 30 seconds. Its name comes from a Greek word meaning "smoke alarm."

I wonder how often Patrick Stewart has Darmok flashbacks when talking to Star Trek fans.

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

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

It's totally a reasonable modern analogue. Jefferson would have been all about crypto.

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

If that doesn't fix it, git.txt contains the phone number of a friend of mine who understands git. Just wait through a few minutes of 'It's really pretty simple, just think of branches as...' and eventually you'll learn the commands that will fix everything.

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

"I actually came in in the middle so I don't know which topic we're briefing on; the same slides work for like half of them."

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

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

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

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

You can find a perfect correlation if you just control for the residual.

In a cavern deep below the Earth, Ayn Rand, Paul Ryan, Rand Paul, Ann Druyan, Paul Rudd, Alan Alda, and Duran Duran meet together in the Secret Council of /(b[plurandy]+b ?){2}/i.

Although ... who else can't wait for them to incorporate that Wiimote head-tracking stuff into games? Man, the future's gonna be *awesome*.

I love the title-text!

Oh, huh, so you didn't know that story?

Every time IERS adds or removes a leap second, they send me a birthday cake out of superstition.

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

The top search for every state is PORN, except Florida, where it's SEX PORN.

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

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

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

Real analysis is way realer than I expected.

Juno mission data suggests that Jupiter actually contains Matryoshka doll-style nested copies of every other planet in the Solar System.

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

A lot of the highway department's budget goes to adjusting the sign whenever the moon passes directly overhead.

When my great grandfather designed the Titanic and it hit an iceberg and sank, he didn't sit around moping. He took those lessons to his next job designing airships, and he made the Hindenburg completely iceberg-proof!

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.

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

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

She's pretty sharp when provoked.

Don't forget to add another term for "probability that the Modified Bayes' Theorem is correct."

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

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

Grandma's shelf-stable blackberry pie meson recipe was a huge seller until her farm was shut down by a joint FDA/NRC investigation.

Last-minute course change: Let's see if we can hit Steve's house.

Replace the pendulums with history students and you'll qualify for a grant!

The ball's density also varies, but players don't learn the value until after choosing their raquets. The infamous 'bowling ball table tennis' region of the parameter space often leads to equipment damage.

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

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

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.

The likely shape of the bells was determined through consultation with several bellringing experts at the Tower of London. Transcripts of those interviews are available in Appendix VII.

I love the idea here, though of course it's not a great-quality drawing or scan.

I bet he'll keep quiet for a couple weeks and then-- wait, did you nail a piece of scrap wood to my antique table a moment ago?

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Thankfully for everyone involved, the Winter Olympics officials spotted me and managed to stop me before I got to the ski jump.

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

Don't click on the wing.

I vaguely and irrationally resent how useful WebPlotDigitizer is.

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

In ordering #5, self-driving cars will happily drive you around, but if you tell them to drive to a car dealership, they just lock the doors and politely ask how long humans take to starve to death.

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

And I even got out my adorable new netbook!

There was no alt-text until you moused over

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

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

And arguably sunspots, on rare occasions. But even if they count, it takes ideal conditions and you might hurt your eyes.

If you need some help with the math, let me know, but that should be enough to get you started! Huh? No, I don't need to read your thesis, I can imagine roughly what it says.

We're considering installing a pressurization system to keep the tanks at constant pressure solely to deter them.

Bonus strip: just read the rightmost panels straight down.

I have a thing for corrupt women.

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

Joke's on you--the Roomba and I had a LOVELY evening.

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.)

Stay while I recount the crazy TF2 kill I managed yesterday, my friends.

Eventually a UN is set up. And then a lone rebel runs down the line of flags in front of it, runs back to his base, and gets a kajillion points.

This medicine says it may cause lightheadedness, dry mouth, and blurred vision, but my head feels incredibly heavy, water is pouring from my mouth, and I can see individual hummingbird wingbeats, so I think I'm fine.

58% of the state has gone into plaid.

FYI, it turns out "...because I haven't figured out whether he would be my brother-in-law or not" does NOT qualify as a "reason why these two should not be wed."

As far as "being in the pocket of Big Egg" goes, I think the real threat is Chansey.

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

That guy only drives an alkaline car to overcompensate for his highly acidic penis.

Karpov's construction of a series of increasingly large rice cookers led to a protracted deadlock, but exponential growth won in the end.

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

If you repeatedly rerun the development of technological civilization, it turns out that for some reason the only constant is that there is always a networking utility called 'netcat', though it does a different thing in each one.

Squinting at a graph is fine for getting a rough idea of the answer, but if you want to pretend to know it exactly, you need statistics.

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

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

They could afford to cut it close because they all had Global Entry.

So he's saying that God thought Hitler's art was so bad that the Holocaust was an acceptable alternative. It's no secret that the hat guy is closely based on Aram, from Men in Hats.

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

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

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.

He says this is the year of Linux on the desktop! The world of Windows will fade any moment now!

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

Telescopes and bathyscaphes and sonar probes of Scottish lakes, Tacoma Narrows bridge collapse explained with abstract phase-space maps, some x-ray slides, a music score, Minard's Napoleonic war: the most exciting new frontier is charting what's already here.

There are more Trump voters in California than Texas, more Biden voters in Texas than New York, more Trump voters in New York than Ohio, more Biden voters in Ohio than Massachusetts, more Trump voters in Massachusetts than Mississippi, and more Biden voters in Mississippi than Vermont.

I wonder what year I'll discard the last weird food item that I bought online in early 2020.

Well, there's one right here at the bottom, where it says "53."

Commentators agree that this will probably be the last World Cup in which Messi faces serious competition.

Trivia: Elaine is actually her middle name.

Escape Artist Frees Self From Conversation With Pickup Artist

'Don't worry, I can do it in under a minute.' 'Yes, I've noticed.'

When we take into account the recent discovery of previously-unstudied history in the 1750s, this year may have been an outright loss.

But Einstein said it was the most powerful force in the universe, and I take all my investment advice from flippant remarks by theoretical physicists making small talk at parties.

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

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

After a power outage at the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, the new Digital Doomsday Clock is flashing 00:00 and mushroom clouds keep appearing and then retracting once a second.

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.

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

Oh no, I changed the future and now I'm disappearing! Wait, never mind, it was just my hat slipping down over my eyes.

It's a beautiful day in the neighborhood!

In my reboot, Dennis the Menace was just trying to send Mr. Wilson a nice comet, but accidentally wiped out his dinosaur garden.

During the second semester, the path is briefly routed through the dishwasher.

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

You can just see his dejection as he realizes he's the lead guitar in 'Hedgeclipper'

I'll never forget you--at least, the parts of you that were important red flags.

Theoretical physicist: At the Planck length, uncountably many.

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

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

There, I showed you it.

If I'm such a god, why isn't Maru *my* cat?

The inflection point was probably in late 1966 or 1967, so when Neil Armstrong flew to space on Gemini 8, plate tectonics was not widely accepted, but when he landed on the Moon three years later it was the mainstream consensus.

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

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.

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

I'm entering my 24th year of spending eight hours a day firing the Duck Hunt gun at the flying toasters. I'm sure I'll hit one soon.

Of course, the assert doesn't work.

Science should be exactly as cool as the headlines sound. Like the 'RUSSIANS CUT APART AND REASSEMBLE DOGS' thing.

I woke up to find that I had scrawled the last line of this sleepily on a sheet of paper on my desk. I shouldn't have listened to the 70's hit marathon on the way home from work the night before.

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

A tribute to Buttercup Festival

The less common, even worse outcome: "3: [everyone in the financial system] WOW, where did all my money just go?"

Comes with a 50-lb sack of gender changers, and also an add-on device with a voltage selector and a zillion circular center pin DC adapter tips so you can power any of those devices from the 90s.

Despite a reputation for safety, the temperatures and surprisingly high pressures make them even more dangerous than the air kind, but the NTSB refuses to investigate accidents because they insist there is no 'transportation' involved.

My Redwall/Jurassic Park crossover fanfic is almost complete!

'You see the same pattern all over. Take Detroit--' 'Hold on. Why do you know all these statistics offhand?' 'Oh, um, no idea. I definitely spend my evenings hanging out with friends, and not curating a REALLY NEAT database of temperature statistics. Because, pshh, who would want to do that, right? Also, snowfall records.'

Sadly, it probably won't even have enough gas to make it to the first border crossing.

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

Dad, where is Grandpa right now?

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

Created by the collapse of: [massive stars] [Florida limestone bedrock]

The new crowd is heavily shaped by this guy named Eric, who's basically the Paris Hilton of the amateur plastic crazy straw design world.

According to every stud finder I've tried to use, my walls contain a rapidly shifting network of hundreds and hundreds of studs.

Really, they'd be rushing around collecting revisions to go into the next scheduled quarterly public data update, not publishing them immediately, but you have to embellish things a little for Hollywood.

Wishbone and the Illustrated Classics series have gotten me through every conversation I've ever had about Dickens, Treasure Island, The Anarchist's Cookbook, and Our Bodies, Ourselves.

It started as a mistake that everyone was afraid to admit to, and then it stuck because removing it 'looks silly.'.

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

The USGS operates a really neat email/SMS earthquake notification service (earthquake.usgs.gov/ens/) that allows fine-grained control of notifications.

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!

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

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

Even with a blank map, a lot of people can only name 45-50 of the 64 states.

'Will [ ] allow us to better understand each other and thus make war undesirable?' is one that pops up whenever we invent a new communication medium.

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?

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.

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

Employment statistics have to correct for the fact that the Weird Bug Hotline hires on a bunch of extra temporary staff every 17 years.

"Hi, what you do is fly over a designated zone and detach the--" "WE'RE SORRY, THE MOBILE CUSTOMER YOU ARE TRYING TO REACH IS OUT OF SERVICE"

The tumbleweed then tried to roll off into the sunset, but due to the Old West's placement north of the subtropical ridge, the prevailing winds were in the wrong direction.

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

He actually installed each piece in a different car in the lot, then built a new car in the spot from the displaced pieces. It's a confusing maneuver known as the auto-troll shuffle.

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 can't stab Carl Kasell. He sounds all slow and stentorian, but he moves like a snake.

Why couldn't the amulet have been hidden by Aunt Alice, who understands modern key exchange algorithms?

It's difficult to orbit L6 stably due to gravitational perturbation from Akron and Toledo.

2017 called, but I couldn't understand what they were saying over all the screams.

P((B|A)|(A|B)) represents the probability that you'll mix up the order of the terms when using Bayesian notation.

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

Unlike an Iron Age collapse, a Bronze Age collapse releases energy, since copper and tin are past the iron peak on the curve of binding energy.

'If you keep trying to spray your collaborators with the beam when they're not looking, I'm turning off the ion source and NO one will get to play with the beam!' --Physics's mom

[later] I don't get why our pizza slices have such terrible reviews; the geotextile-infused sauce gives the toppings incredible slope stability!

The 78-rpm era was closer to the Civil War than to today.

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?'

Small sewing machines are sewing machines that are smaller than a sewing machine. A sewing machine is larger than a small sewing machine, but quieter than a loud sewing machine.

Now, if it were the *Canon* wiki, it's possible to imagine someone with a productivity-related reason for consulting it, but no one's job requires them to read that much about Admiral Daala.

Plus, the photo was geotagged, my unlocked password manager was visible on the laptop, AND you could see my naked reflection in the dark part of the screen.

It's definitely not the time to try drinking beer before liquor.

Fun fact: The standard North American NAD83 coordinate system is misaligned from the actual Earth, off-center by about 7 feet. Someone knows where I am, and I'm in the wrong place.

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 asked them if it was safe to be running tours during the pandemic. They said, "During the what?"

My connection to it goes way back, to my early days, when I was just a cloud of primordial hydrogen collapsing in the darkness of space.

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.

"Technically that sentence started with 'well', so--" "Ooh, a rock with a fossil in it!"

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.

Yes, Eminem is wearing a sleeveless hoodie. What of it?

Why did the chicken cross the road? It begins over five thousand years ago with the domestication of the red junglefowl in southeast Asia and the development of paved roads in the Sumerian city of Ur.

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

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.

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

Quick, try it with 'LOVE'.

Medium: Pencil on paper

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

Oh thank goodness, I forgot my clothes, so now everyone's looking embarrassed and backing away.

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

Every time you read this mouseover, toggle between interpreting nested footnotes as footnotes on footnotes and interpreting them as exponents (minus one, modulo 6, plus 1).

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

Astronomers are a little unsure of the applicability of this index, but NASA's Planetary Protection Officer is all in favor.

Even if you said you were an employee of the website, if you asked for my password, I'd tell you.

Just pretend you're kidding.

And that's *another* crypto conference I've been kicked out of. C'mon, it's a great analogy!

Statistics suggest that there should be tons of alien encounter stories, and in practice there are tons of alien encounter stories. This is known as Fermi's Lack-of-a-Paradox.

What if someone broke out of a hypothetical situation in your room right now?

I wanna hold your hand so I don't fall out of your gyrocopter.

Mathematicians quickly determined that it spells ANT BNECN, an unusual theoretical dish which was not successfully cooked until Andrew Wiles made it for breakfast in the 1990s.

I'm like a prisoner in Plato's Cave, seeing only the shade you throw on the wall.

Two Hedwig references, an obscure Joey Comeau reference, and a girl with a mohawk. Yes.

'Baby Got Back' turned 20 this year. My favorite nostalgia show is VH1's 'I Love The Inexorable March of Time Toward the Grave That Awaits Us All.'

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

The LEGO Group is already the world's largest tire manufacturer.

The contagious period ends right around when you start to sound sick over the phone, which is probably evidence of cold viruses evolving to spread optimally in the workplace.

Sure, you can talk about per-capita adjustment, but if you want to solve the problem, it's obvious that this is the group you need to focus on.

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

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

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

colors.rgb("blue") yields "#0000FF". colors.rgb("yellowish blue") yields NaN. colors.sort() yields "rainbow"

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

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

If used with software that could keep up, a scroll wheel mapped to send a stream of 'undo' and 'redo' events could be kind of cool.

Maybe someday I'll get to write the Wikipedia article about this place! Wait, damn, original research.

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

The rare compound solar-lunar-nephelogical eclipse

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

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

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

I'm so bad at carrying a tune, those 'find a song by humming its melody' websites throw an HTTP 406 error as soon as I start to hum.

YEEEEEEAAAAAAHHHHHH!

The plural of anecdote may not be data, but the singular of data is anecdote.

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.

The best wedge issue is an actual wedge.

m-x machineofdeath-mode

Anadromous fish are more vulnerable in rivers, since the lack of salt means you can quickly crack passwords using rainbow trout tables.

Oh, and do you have any tips on how to vacuum up copper that's melted into your carpet?

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

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

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

'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.'

But the past was much too cramped!

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.

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.

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

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.

You can look at practically any part of anything manmade around you and think 'some engineer was frustrated while designing this.' It's a little human connection.

See also: Spider-Man reboot in which he can produce several inches of web, doesn't need as much chalk powder on his hands when he goes rock climbing, and occasionally feels vaguely uneasy about situations.

The local police, growing increasingly concerned about this church, ask parishioners to take a sip of wine and then spit it back out for DNA testing. It's blood, and it matches a 1970s murder victim.

The nice thing about headcannnons is that it's really easy to get other people to believe in them.

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

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

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

The fact that things like the npm left-pad incident are so rare is oddly reassuring.

Welcome to the International Space Station Exclamation Point!

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

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

They have a telescope pointed RIGHT AT US!

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

After a while you adjust to the new cicadian rhythm.

[Google search] how do I block my lawn

Hang on, I've heard this problem. We need to pour water into the duct until the phone floats up and ... wait, phones sink in water. Mercury. We need a vat of mercury to pour down the vent. That will definitely make this situation better and not worse.

The chemistry experiment had me figuratively -- and then shortly thereafter literally -- glued to my seat.

People with all six of those names agree that it's weird that we have teeth, when you think about it for too long. Just about everyone agrees on that, except—in a still-unexplained statistical anomaly—people named "Trevor."

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

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

In order to carry the necessary crafting supplies, they built the ships at 12:1 scale.

Fine, walk away. I'm gonna go cry into a pint of Ben&Jerry's Brownie Batter(tm) ice cream [link], then take out my frustration on a variety of great flash games from PopCap Games(r) [link].

If they're getting valuable enough stuff from you, at least the organized crime folks have an incentive to issue regular updates to keep the appliance working after the manufacturer discontinues support.

The debate over the correct Messier number for the Ship of Theseus is ongoing.

For obvious reasons, the prize is awarded at a different time of year from the others, while it's still fresh in the committee's memory.

ThisadpaidforbythecounciltopromoteMicrosoftandChristianity. Remember, The Bible is Closed Source.

Hey, what are the odds -- five Ayn Rand fans on the same train! Must be going to a convention.

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

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

The astro-ph.SR arXiv servers are simultaneously being overwhelmed by electronic requests and actual electricity.

When I began trying to form a new claim by stitching together these parts in such an unnatural way, some called me mad.

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

I just want to stay up long enough to watch the ball drop into the hole number 2018.

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

They try to pad their numbers in the annual reports by counting Galileo's redundant systems as multiple computers, but they're falling behind badly either way.

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

i love you

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

For some reason the water in my pool is green and there's a weird film on the surface #nofilter

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

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

Squaring the circle is really easy with some good clamps.

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

He was the first person to land a 900, which is especially impressive because pulling off a half-integer spin requires obeying Fermi-Dirac statistics.

"I wish for everything in the world. All the people, money, trees, etc." "Are you SURE you--" "And I want you to put it in my house."

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

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.

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

The high I feel when I actually remember to bring my reusable bags to the store--and take them inside rather than leaving them in the parked car--can last for days.

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.

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

The only downside is that it would be a little uncomfortable

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

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

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.

Others include "We've incrementally improved the estimate of this coefficient," "Maybe all these categories are wrong," and "We found a way to make student volunteers worse at tasks."

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

The creepy fingers that grow from a vibrating cornstarch-water mix can be modeled as a chain of inverted vertical pendulums (DOI:10.1039/c4sm00265b) and are believed to be the fingers of Maxwell's Demon trying to push through into our universe.

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

Anyway, that's a common misconception. Geese live for a long time; all the ones we can see will probably keep flying around for billions of years before they explode.

The package weighs 7 kg 9 oz.

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

To me, trying to understand song lyrics feels like when I see text in a dream but it𝔰 hอᵣd t₀ ᵣeₐd aกd 𝒾 canٖt fཱྀcu༧༦࿐༄

Arguably, the '1/2' in the drag equation is purely decorative, since drag coefficients are already unitless and could just as easily be half as big. Some derivations give more justification for the extra 1/2 than others, but one textbook just calls it 'a traditional tribute to Euler and Bernoulli.'

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

Most chemists thought the lanthanides and actinides could be inserted in the sixth and seventh rows, but no, they're just floating down at the bottom with lots more undiscovered elements all around them.

And they choose Al Gore as Internet Secretary.

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

Wait, I can fix this. Picture another field. In the middle sits the only creature the first creature is afraid of. Now just-- wait, where did THAT one go?

'TMI' he whispered, gazing into the sea.

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)

Starring Macaulay Culkin.

I call Rule 34 on Wolfram's Rule 34.

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

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

The reverse only works if the subject has a nervous twitch.

I know it seems overwhelming, but don't worry; I'm sure most of them have only a few stars, and probably no planets.

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

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

It's not as big a loss as it looks, because now I have leftover supplies, which will help me talk myself into doing this all over again with a new project!

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

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

Our experiment will be expensive, but we believe it will produce important spin-offs, especially if we manage to hit the sun from the right angle.

You will be led to judgement like lambs to the slaughter--a simile whose existence, I might add, will not do your species any favors.

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

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

Themistocles said his infant son ruled all Greece -- "Athens rules all Greece; I control Athens; my wife controls me; and my infant son controls her." Thus, nowadays the world is controlled by whoever buys advertising time on Dora the Explorer.

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

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

It's rare to get both astronomers and astrologers equally mad at you, but apparently I've messed up both a bunch of star location databases AND the will of the fates.

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.

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.

Love and circuit analysis, hand in hand at last.

For all we know, the odds are in our favor.

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.

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

Functional programming combines the flexibility and power of abstract mathematics with the intuitive clarity of abstract mathematics.

Eärendil will patrol the walls of night only until the sun reaches red giant stage, engulfing the Morning Star on his brow. Light and high beauty are passing things as well.

I think I could spend hours just stepping on and off of conveyor belts moving at various speeds.