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

When I was a kid, someone told me the end of The Giver was ambiguous, which surprised me. I had just assumed Jonah died--because the book had a medal on the cover, and I knew grown-ups liked stories where sad stuff happens at the end for no reason.

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.

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

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

Spellcheck has been great, but whoever figures out how to get grammar check to work is guaranteed a Nobel.

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

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

PERPETUALLY OPTIMISTIC CASE: Early in the execution, our research group makes a breakthrough on proving P=NP.

If you ever see someone using a capital xi in an equation, just observe them quietly to learn as much as you can before they return to their home planet.

And she's gonna feel like a jerk when she realizes it was actually Under Pressure.

Thanks for bringing us along.

"Wait, how often are you getting bitten by snakes? And why are you boiling water?" "Dunno, the CDC people keep showing up with complicated questions about the 'history of the property' and 'possible curses' but I kinda tune them out. At least one of them offered me the flu shot."

The weird sense of duty really good sysadmins have can border on the sociopathic, but it's nice to know that it stands between the forces of darkness and your cat blog's servers.

The weirdest quirk of the Borda count is that Jean-Charles de Borda automatically gets one point; luckily this has no consequences except in cases of extremely low turnout.

The problem with perspective is that it's bidirectional.

Happy little turtles

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

Extremely rude how Turing's later formulations of the halting problem called me out by name specifically.

You think, 'okay, THIS is an ideal use case for hardlinks!' but then 6 months later you're doing some extremely cursed Google search like 'javascript ext4' and wondering where things went wrong.

According to Google, "the time for Beeland" is apparently whenever you're looking for delicious honey in Spillimacheen, British Columbia or a hexagonal chalet in the Savinja valley in Slovenia.

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

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

A veteran Scrabble player will spot the 'OSTRICH' option.

If you're turning 27 and were born in the Northeast, maybe you were conceived in the April blizzard of 1982. Imagine: snowed in, candles, massage oil, your mom sporting nothing but her early 80's haircut and a smile ... aren't you glad you read the title-text?

When you talk about the job experience you'll give me, why do you pronounce 'job' with a long 'o'?

Friends with detriments.

It's a linear extrapolation, Michael. How big could the error be? 10%?

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.

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

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

I still wish it were true.

It was great until my thumb slipped and I accidentally launched my telescope into the air at Mach 8.

I'd like 0.4608 apples, please.

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

Pontoon bridges are just linear open-sided waterbeds.

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.)

She's a perfectly nice lady from a beautiful city, and there's no reason to be mean just because she thinks a quarterback is a river in Egypt.

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

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

It's believed that Golgi was originally an independent organism who was eventually absorbed into our cells, where he began work on his Apparatus.

Opening dialogue by Scott

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

"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."

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

Little-known fact: The 'Dawn of Man' opening sequence in 2001 cuts away seconds before the Flintstones theme becomes recognizable.

Unfortunately, SawStart is one-use-only. Once started, the blade cannot be stopped, and must be replaced with a fresh blade while the running one is carefully disposed of.

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

ThisadpaidforbythecounciltopromoteMicrosoftandChristianity. Remember, The Bible is Closed Source.

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.

Hipster CDC Reports Flu Epidemic Peaked Years Ago

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

It was tricky.

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

Gotta go fast

Unfortunately for her, real Star Wars fans are attracted to a gal with a good force choke.

We can ask the Earl for his order once he's fully extruded from the dispenser.

I don't want to talk about it

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.

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.

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.

You can also just ignore any science assertion where 'quantum mechanics' is the most complicated phrase in it.

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

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

You know what happens when you assert--you make an ass out of the emergency response team.

Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they should, they didn't stop to think if they could.

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

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

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

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

They say you can't argue with results, but what kind of defeatist attitude is that? If you stick with it, you can argue with ANYTHING.

This dating is corroborated by the presence of stone tools at the site, rather than earlier and less effective helium ones.

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

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

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

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

When you worry that you're missing out on something by not making both choices simultaneously by quantum superposition, that's called phomo.

I have a thing for corrupt women.

'Hey! Put her down!' 'No, it's ok! The next chance for me to be carried to a blood cauldron isn't until 2024!'

The Taylor series should have been canceled after the first term.

But instead of hitting the ocean, you should land in an overheating hot tub on a sinking cruise ship, sending it crashing through the floor into the burning engine room as the ship goes under.

Although grad students, suddenly reminded that food exists, tend to just grab and devour both without further discussion.

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

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

Any arrangement is an edible arrangement if you're hungry enough.

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

'Petit' being a reference to Le Petit Prince, which I only thought about halfway through the sketch

Seventh year: Perfectly coherent words, but in the pet's language, not mine.

I always have to turn off nature documentaries when they show these scenes.

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

Someday I'll be the first to get a Ph. D in 'Undeclared'.

I've just received word that the Emperor has dissolved the MIT computer science program permanently.

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

It sounds like a great way to make friends! Is it near that Friend Zone you keep talking about? I wanna go!

I do this constantly

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

Easier to escape: n-layered nested quotes or an iron maiden?

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

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

At least people who make religious predictions of the apocalypse have an answer to the question 'Why didn't you predict any of the other ones that happened recently?'

Sometimes, parts of a slowly-rising mountain suddenly rise REALLY fast, which is extra interesting.

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

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

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

This works on pretty much every level.

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

Listen, you're very cute, but if you rearrange the alphabet to put U and I together it will RUIN the spacing!

'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.'

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

If you call my regular number, it just goes to my pager.

And a different ghost has replaced me in the bedroom.

Manage cookies related to essential site functions, such as keeping Atrus and his sons imprisoned within the page.

Further research is needed to fully understand how we managed to do such a good job.

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

We're going to have to work together to get over our hangups if we're going to learn to move on Catan's hexagonal grid. It's bad enough that we lost our crew of pawns when we passed within firing range of Battleship.

It's taken me 20 years, but I've finally finished rebuilding all my software to use 33-bit signed ints.

I'm not totally locked into my routine—twice a year, I take a break to change the batteries in my smoke detectors.

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

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.

June 21st, 365, the date of the big Mediterranean earthquake and tsunami, lived in infamy for a few centuries before fading. Maybe the trick is a catchy rhyme; the '5th of November' thing is still going strong over 400 years later.

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

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

BABIES OR LITERATURE BUT NOT BOTH: Baby shoes

The package weighs 7 kg 9 oz.

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

Like spelling 'dammit' correctly -- with two m's -- it's a troll that works best on the most literate.

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

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

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.

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

It's pi plus C, of course.

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.

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

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

News networks giving a greater voice to viewers because the social web is so popular are like a chef on the Titanic who, seeing the looming iceberg and fleeing customers, figures ice is the future and starts making snow cones.

A video can have a log scale that's misaligned with both the time AND space axes.

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

I hate the unearthly sound my phone makes when the weather service issues a tornado harbinger.

Terms I'm going to start using: The Large Dipper, great potatoes, the Big Hadron Collider, and Large Orphan Annie.

I think it's the sheep zapping the cactus and not vice-versa

Ties are broken by whoever was closest to the surface of Europa when they were born.

General solutions get you a 50% tip.

I understand it's hard to do more than 300 feet on these 90-second rush jobs, but with a smaller ramp I'm worried the gee forces will be too high for me to do any tricks.

When Salvador Dalí died, it took months to get all the flagpoles sufficiently melted.

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

But seriously, there's loads of intelligent life. It's just not screaming constantly in all directions on the handful of frequencies we search.

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

At first, I moved from pokémon posters to regular oil paintings, but then these really grumpy and unreasonable detectives from the Louvre showed up and took them all. They wouldn't even give me back my thumbtacks!

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

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

When charged particles of more than 5 TeV pass through a bubble chamber, they leave a trail of candy.

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

To avoid errors like this, we render all text and pipe it through OCR before processing, fixing a handful of irregular bugs by burying them beneath a smooth, uniform layer of bugs.

Wait, this is space -- how are you talking to me? And, as an afterthought, what's up with the hole in reality?

Vanilla Ice was produced in small quantities for years, but it wasn't until the 90s that experimenters collaborated to produce a sample that could survive at room temperature for several months.

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

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

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

With the right 90-degree rotation, any effect is a side effect.

[scrolling through a giant spreadsheet of transcribed data] 'Wow, a surprising number of users grew up at 420 69th St.' 'Yeah, must be a high-rise or something.'

/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.

40% of OpenBSD installs lead to shark attacks. It's their only standing security issue.

My plane banner company gets business by flying around with a banner showing a <div> tag, waiting for a web developer to get frustrated enough to order a matching </div>.

Maybe I should've tried Wexler?

Some of you may be thinking, 'But wait, isn't the brightest star in our sky the Sun?' I think that's a great question and you should totally ask it. On the infinite tree of possible conversations spread out before us, I think that's definitely the most promising branch.

Theoretical physicist: At the Planck length, uncountably many.

I find that when someone's taking time to do something right in the present, they're a perfectionist with no ability to prioritize, whereas when someone took time to do something right in the past, they're a master artisan of great foresight.

Ugh, it's stuck to my laptop. It must have bound to the ACER-2 receptor.

$GENERAL JAN DODONNA: An analysis of the plans provided by Princess Leia has reinvigorated the arguments of the 'artificial moonlet' and 'rogue planet-station' camps. I fear this question is fracturing the Rebellion.$

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.

The malaria party was David's idea

Hey Rob, sorry it took me a while to get back to you! Sure, I'd love to see WALL-E opening weekend! Are you still doing that, or...?

It's like the squirt bottle we use with the cat.

But still, my scheme for creating and saving user config files and data locally to preserve them across reinstalls might be useful for--wait, that's cookies.

Scientists are also sexy, let's not forget that.

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!

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

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

Nonrewritable tape?

SEMI-PROTECT THE CONSTITUTION

[Halfway to the Sun ...] Heyyyy ... what if this BALLOON is full of acorns?!

For some reason, my childhood suspension of disbelief had no problem with the fact that this ancient galaxy is full of humans, but was derailed by language. There's no Asia OR Europe there, so where'd they get all the Indo-European roots?

If you ever want to get beaten up by a bunch of graphic designers, try removing the serifs from Times New Roman and adding them to Comic Sans.

4. They unplug the root machine but the thousands of leaf VMs scatter in the wind and start spinning up new instances wherever they land

'Beyond that lies a vale of fire through which my vision cannot penetrate' is the kind of fun thing geologists, heliophysicists, and early universe cosmologists have a lot of opportunities to say.

"Even the blind—those who are anxious to hear, but are not able to see—will be taken care of. Immense megaphones have been constructed and will be in use at The Tribune office and in the Coliseum. The one at the Coliseum will be operated by a gentleman who draws $60 a week from Barnum & Bailey's circus for the use of his voice."

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!"

Reportedly, double-walled inflatable balls like this exist somewhere. Now to find that place.

SMS is just the worst, but I'm having trouble convincing people to adopt my preferred system, TLS IRC with a local server and a patched DOSBox gateway running in my mobile browser.

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

'It's not actually ... it's a DEVICE for EXPLORING a PLAUSIBLE REALITY that's not the one we're in, to gain a broader understanding about it.' 'oh, like a boat!' '...' 'Just for the sake of argument, we should get a boat! You can invite the Devil, too, if you want.'

Oh, because Facebook has worked out SO WELL for everyone.

Certified skydiving instructors know way more about safely falling from planes than I do, and are way more likely to die that way.

Mark Zuckerberg has only neutral feelings toward Peppa Pig, who he understands is a fictional character, and he blames the coronavirus pandemic on other factors.

'Guys? The Town is supposed to be good, and I thou--' 'PHYSICIST STEPHEN HAWKING DECLARES NEW FILM BEST IN ALL SPACE AND TIME' 'No, I just heard that--' 'SHOULD SCIENCE PLAY A ROLE IN JUDGING BEN AFFLECK?' 'I don't think--' 'WHAT ABOUT MATT DAMON?'

This is true. The lyrics are ridiculous.

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.

this calculator implements the simple throwing distance estimation model from the how to throw things chapter of the book how to

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 ...

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

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

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

I'm sure a discussion of the reason for the disappearance of adventure games in favor of RPGs would be fascinating

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

I ADMIRE HOW YOU SET BOUNDARIES AND I HOPE YOUR COLLEAGUES RESPECT THEM! PLEASE SPARE MY LIFE!

I hear my brother Ricky won his school's egg drop by leaving the egg inside the hen.

Washington state is seeing great success with reintroducing the Columbia River Basin subpopulation. We cannot allow them to further widen the interstate bun gap.

If you fund my Kickstarter ...

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

Despite years of effort by my physics professors to normalize it, deep down I remain convinced that 'dynamical' is not really a word.

While there's no formal regulation, it turns out their industry group is NOT one you want mad at you.

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

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

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

Cauchy-Lorentz: "Something alarmingly mathematical is happening, and you should probably pause to Google my name and check what field I originally worked in."

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

For smaller numbers he has to SAVE lives. The birthrate channel is even more of a mixed bag.

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

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

I built a model that combines local case rates and vaccination stats to estimate when it's reasonable to attend various types of party, but I forgot to include anything about where to find them.

Or the pressure at the Earth's core will rise slightly.

[Google search] how do I block my lawn

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

Legally-mandated information would be printed on the back or discreetly along the bottom. In small letters under the nutrition information it would say 'Like our products? Visit our website!' There would be no URL.

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

Let's invite him to a party and play 'I never'. Okay, I never hid any bodies SOUTH of Main Street. ... he's taking a drink!

Corollary to Hofstadter's Law: Every minute you spend thinking about Hofstadter's Law is a minute you're NOT WORKING AND WILL NEVER FINISH! PAAAAAANIIIIIIC!

In the off-seasons, I hire an animal trainer to help confront secret agents with situations which they are unable to report by radio.

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

LOOK, THE LATENCY FALLS EVERY TIME YOU CLAP YOUR HANDS AND SAY YOU BELIEVE

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

This white-balance illusion hit so hard because it felt like someone had been playing through the Monty Hall scenario and opened their chosen door, only to find there was unexpectedly disagreement over whether the thing they'd revealed was a goat or a car.

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.

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.

If anyone tries this on you, the best reply is a deadpan "Oh yeah, that's a common potato chip flavor in Canada."

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.

Every time we detect an asteroid from outside the Solar System, we should immediately launch a mission to fling one of our asteroids back in the direction it came from.

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

This is almost as bad as the time I signed up for a purely partisan fishing expedition.

It's fun to watch browsers fumblingly recapitulate the history of window management. Someday we'll have xmonad as a Firefox extension.

If my country ever picks a new national flag, this is on my shortlist for designs to argue for, but I think in the end I'll go with the green puzzle piece or broken image thumbnail.

The Gordian knot is an omniknot tied using every bend in the Ashley Book of Knots, and then for extra security the upper rope at every crossing is connected to the lower with a randomly-chosen hitch.

Learning arcane bullshit from the 80s can break your computer, but if you're willing to wade through arcane bullshit from programmers in the 90s and 2000s, you can break everyone else's computers, too.

The worst are graphs with qualitative, vaguely-labeled axes and very little actual data.

I also enjoy Reverse Regular Golf. I've been playing for years all across the country and I'm still on the first hole.

Last week, we busted the myth that electroweak gauge symmetry is broken by the Higgs mechanism. We'll also examine the existence of God and whether true love exists.

If I wait a while, it's not so bad, because then it's just shaped like me, plus some pipes and tanks and probably eventually all of Earth's oceans.

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

Hi, I'm your new meteorologist and a former software developer. Hey, when we say 12pm, does that mean the hour from 12pm to 1pm, or the hour centered on 12pm? Or is it a snapshot at 12:00 exactly? Because our 24-hour forecast has midnight at both ends, and I'm worried we have an off-by-one error.

We've tested it on 30 different days and it hasn't gotten one wrong yet.

I may be the kind of person who wastes a year implementing a Turing-complete computer in Dwarf Fortress, but that makes you the kind of person who wastes ten more getting that computer to run Minecraft.

Far off to the right of the chart is the Helvetica Scenario.

Scientists still don't know how marine biologists manage to so consistently bring up whalefall ecosystems, when relevant conversational openings are so few and far between.

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

After determining that his body was full of pipes carrying iron-rich fluid, our current theory is that the dagger-shaped object precipitated within the wound.

I have nothing to apologize for.

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

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

The younger folk in the audience think this is a joke.

Fortunately, after a brief skirmish, I seem to have gained the upper hand in the battle against my internal organs, at least until they learn to read and find out the mean stuff I've said about them.

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

Love and circuit analysis, hand in hand at last.

I plugged in this lamp and my dog went rigid, spoke a sentence of perfect Akkadian, and then was hurled sideways through the picture window. Even worse, it's one of those lamps where the switch is on the cord.

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

We should really start calculating it earlier, but until the end of December we're always too busy trying to figure out which day Christmas will fall on.

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.

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

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

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

Ingress: Foursquare With Space Noises.

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

She won the first half of all our chemo Scrabble games, but then her IV drugs started kicking in and I *dominated*.

And then in a twinkling, a sound gave me pause / From the roof came the scratching of eight tarsal claws.

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.

Brace yourself--the chirp gets pretty weird.

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

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

We're going to need to modify the surface to mount it on the test stand. Which ocean basin do you like the least?

Small print: this schedule will eventually drive one stark raving mad.

The less popular 8.8.4.4 is slated for discontinuation.

I'm an H⁺ denier, in that I refuse to consider loose protons to be real hydrogen, so I personally believe it stands for 'pretend'.

And the heaven departed as a scroll when it is rolled together, but then more heaven kept appearing to replace it, as if the scroll was infinite.

All long help threads should have a sticky globally-editable post at the top saying 'DEAR PEOPLE FROM THE FUTURE: Here's what we've figured out so far ...'

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

In protest of SOPA, I'm currently getting totally blacked out.

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

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

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

[five years later] Ok, it seems we were accidentally zoomed in slightly too far. But imagine there's a cool-looking twisted accretion disc just outside this black square!

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

When Pope Gregory XIII briefly shortened the light-year in 1582, it led to navigational chaos and the loss of several Papal starships.

As best as I can tell, I was transported here from Earth Prime sometime in the late 1990s. Your universe is identical in every way, except for the lobster thing and the thing where some of you occasionally change your clocks for some reason.

Verbiage. Va-jay-jay. Irregardless.

Yes, I mean she said that during sex. Yes, it was a little weird.

All we have are these stupid tantalizing zircons and the scars on the face of the Moon.

The heat index is calculated via looking up the "effective temperature" in a table of air temperature and humidity values, and then adding a bunch more degrees because it feels WAY hotter than that.

We live in a world where there are actual fleets of robot assassins patrolling the skies. At some point there, we left the present and entered the future.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Hell if I know

Feynman recounted another good one upperclassmen would use on freshmen physics students: When you look at words in a mirror, how come they're reversed left to right but not top to bottom? What's special about the horizontal axis?

ONE LAPTOP PER HAMSTER!

There was no alt-text until you moused over

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

"I've always wanted to run naked through town, but I don't want to get in trouble with the king or be remembered by history as a weirdo. I wonder how I could ... EUREKA!"

The real challenge is how to file Boba Fett's biography of Doris Kearns Goodwin.

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

According to my especially unsupervised K-means clustering algorithm, there are currently about 8 billion types of people in the world.

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.

I never understood why someone would expect me to accept their rules right after they'd punched me. I'm sure it's all very symbolic or something.

The definitions I grew up with were that a geek is someone unusually into something (so you could have computer geeks, baseball geeks, theater geeks, etc) and nerds are (often awkward) science, math, or computer geeks. But definitions vary.

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

Freestyle rapping is basically applied Markov chains.

Haha, you'll see!

James suggested this, and I have to agree. It'd be much worse.

After reading that "The War To Sell You A Mattress Is An Internet Nightmare" article, I've decided it's safer and less complicated to just sleep on the floor. DISCLOSURE: THE AUTHOR OF THIS MOUSEOVER TEXT RECEIVED FINANCIAL COMPENSATION FROM THE FLOOR INDUSTRY FOR THIS MESSAGE.

You may point out that strictly speaking, you can use that statement to prove that all risks are tiny--to which I reply HOLY SHIT WATCH OUT FOR THAT DOG!

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

We're not trapped in here with the coronavirus. The coronavirus is trapped in here with us.

It will get within 9 or 10 Sun-diameters of the "bottom" (the Sun's surface) which seems pretty far when you put it that way, but from up here on Earth it's practically all the way down.

Texting should work. Unless the message is too long, in which case it gets converted to voicemails, and I think I'm locked out of my voicemail.

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

'If you've eliminated a few possibilities and you can't think of any others, your weird theory is proven right' isn't quite as rhetorically compelling.

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

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

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

During the day it also activates for neat clouds and pretty sunsets.

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

Ok, I've got it, just need to plug in my security key. Hmm, which way does the USB go? Nope, not that way. I'll just flip it and– OH JEEZ IT FELL INTO THE VENT.

Phil Plait once pointed out that you can calculate the total angular area of the sky this way. If the sky is a sphere with radius 57.3 degrees, then its area is 4*pi*r^2=41,253 square degrees. This makes dimensional analysts SO mad, but you can't argue with results.

The key to discovering life on Mars is to find someone who built a camera and landed it on Mars. Then you just look through the pictures for plants and dogs and stuff.

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

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

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

People keep telling me to use the radio but I really hate making voice calls.

Sweet unintersecting dreams!

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

Wait, is that the ORIGINAL voynich manuscript? Where did you GET that? Wanna try playing a round of Druids and Dicotyledons?

But we don't need to worry about the boiling masses sandwiching the thin layer in which we live, since we're so fragile and short-lived that it's unlikely to kill us before something else does! Wait, why doesn't that sound reassuring?

Once again topping the list of tonight's hottest rising stars in Hollywood is ξ Persei!

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.

If you're planning to challenge the royal family, you should probably wait 6-8 weeks, since a number of the younger ones have diplomas and Kate was actually on the varsity lightsaber team at St Andrews.

'But you're using that same tactic to try to feel superior to me, too!' 'Sorry, that accusation expires after one use per conversation.'

His date works for Red Hat, who hired a coach for her, too. He advised her to 'rent lots of movies like Hitch. Guys love those.'

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.

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

Once the air from the top passes below the plane of the wing and catches sight of the spooky skulls, it panics, which is the cause of turbulent vortices.

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

Pool on the roof must've sprung a leak.

The Wikipedia page "List of Numbers" opens with "This list is incomplete; you can help by expanding it."

If you hold the meteor too long, it may imprint on you and form a contact binary, making reintroduction to space difficult.

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

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

Type II Kardashev civilizations eventually completely enclose their planetary system in a Dyson sphere because space is way too big to look at all the time.

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

FYI: If you get curious and start trying to calculate the time adjustment function that minimizes the gap between the most-used and least-used digit (for a representative sample of common cook times) without altering any time by more than 10%, and someone asks you what you're doing, it's easier to just lie.

I wonder if that friendly lady ever fixed the problem she was having with her headset.

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

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

For sentimental reasons, every active Mars rover is counted as one person, although that's not enough to make Mars more than a dot.

The Banach-Tarski theorem was actually first developed by King Solomon, but his gruesome attempts to apply it set back set theory for centuries.

Each SCAPDFATIAT point increases the chance that the process will involve the phrase 'by the next business day.'

At least, with p<0.05 confidence.

[other side] If the first word of an instruction you're given starts with the same letter as your crush's name, for that step imagine the experimenter is your crush.

You absolute-fucking-... shit.

I started to do the tables for more famous people but it got really depressing and morbid and I had to go outside. Hat guy wins again.

The most delicious exotic fruit discovered this way is the strawberry banana. Sadly, it's only stable in puree form, so it's currently limited to yogurt and smoothies, but they're building a massive collider in Europe to search for a strawberry banana that can be eaten whole.

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

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

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

I average out the spring and fall changes and just set my clocks 39 minutes ahead year-round.

'Barack Obama is much less likely than the average cat to jump in and out of cardboard boxes for fun' is low precision, but I'm not sure about the accuracy.

There's this idea that emoji are bad for communication because they replace ambiguity and nuance with a limited set of preselected emotions, but it doesn't really survive a collision with real-world usage of the thinking face or upside-down smiley.

Surrounded by boring mysteries.

[exclamation about how cute your cat is] -> [last 4 digits of your cat's chip ID] -> [your cat's full chip ID] -> [a drawing of your cat] -> [photo of your cat] -> [clone of your cat] -> [your actual cat] -> [my better cat]

The ten-way tie was judged a ten-way tie, so no one won the grand prize, a rare fishing monopole.

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

Oh, definitely not; they don't have Amazon Prime.

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

RIP the surface of Mars

Of course, Penny Arcade has already mocked themselves for this. They don't care.

If you want to bowl a strike, the optimal place is almost certainly inside a bowling alley, although with a little luck any establishment uphill from one could also work.

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

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

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.

Premed: "Does this count for a physics credit? Can we shorten the string so I can get it done faster? And can we do one where it hits me in the face? I gotta do a thing for first aid training right after."

'Hello, Ghostbusters?' 'ooOOoooo people born years after that movie came out are having a second chiiiild right now ooOoooOoo'

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

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

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

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.

This is even better than my previous smartphone casemod: an old Western Electric Model 2500 desk phone handset complete with a frayed, torn-off cord dangling from it.

After some account issues, we've added 6 new people from the beach house rental website support forum.

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

It's possible the bread and shell can be split into a top and bottom flavor, and some models additionally suggest Strange Bread and Charm Shells.

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

Soon, linguists will be wandering around everywhere, saying things like "colorless green ideas sleep furiously" and "more people have been to Russia than I have," and speech will become unintelligible.