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

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

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

Listen, they request that you stop submitting a listing for your house labeled 'WHERE YOU BROKE MY HEART'.

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

Click for an actual flowchart for identifying a meteorite. My favorite part is how 'Did someone see it fall? -> Yes' points to 'NOT A METEORITE.' This is not a mistake.

<A>: Like </a>this.

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

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

The best part of crashing a Mars briefing is you can get in a full 11 minutes of questions before they can start to respond.

Charsets even used to be known as 'alpha-bets' before that word's obvious negative associations caused it to die out.

'Rating: 1/5. Room filled to brim with semen, and when front desk clerk opened mouth to talk, bedbugs poured out.'

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

Our models fall apart where the three theories overlap; we're unable to predict what happens when a nanometer-sized squirrel eats a grapefruit with the mass of the sun.

You know what really helps an existential crisis? Wondering how much shelf space to leave for a Terry Pratchett collection.

If we can destroy enough of the lights in our region, we may see more comets, but that's a risk we'll have to take.

To anyone I've taken on a terrible date, this is retroactively my cover story.

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

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

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

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!

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

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

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

Although Kansas is widely thought to contain the geographic center of the contiguous 48 states, topologists now believe that it's actually their outer edge.

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!

I just want to give him a hug or something.

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.

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

Stay right there, we'll be back in a minute. We've just gotta brainstorm some new wonders. Have you all figured out gears yet? Yes? Crap.

'Broom first, then slippers.' 'How do I know you'll return the broom once you've secured your ticket?' 'I'll leave my little dog as collateral.' 'Great. Pleasure doing business!'

God was like, "Let there be light," and there was light.

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

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.

The ideal mix for maximum competitive cable-coiling energy is one A/V tech, one rock climber, one sailor, and one topologist.

[Below] On this site on May 12th, 2023, I finally learned how to use the masonry bit for my drill.

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

I'm not listening to you. I mean, what does a SQUIRREL know about mental health?

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

This really validates Jones's strategy of getting several thousand more votes than Smith. In retrospect, that was a smart move; those votes were crucial.

In general you should only include your single best data point in the paper. The rest of the data can go in the supplementary materials.

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

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

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

The typical internet user (who wants to share) has an IQ of 147 and a 9-inch penis. Well, better than the reverse, I guess.

If you're not cool enough to do it manually, you can look up tools like Upside-Down-Ternet for playing games with people on your wifi.

Still waiting for the Pokémon Go update that lets you capture strangers' pets.

Copy of Copy of Copy of Copy of Copy of Copy of Copy of Copy of Copy of Copy of Copy of Copy of Copy of Copy of Copy of Copy of Copy of Copy of Copy of Copy of Copy of Copy of Copy of Copy of Copy of Copy of Copy of Copy of Copy of Copy of Copy of Copy of Copy of Untitled.doc

Bad idea #271: Dropping into the half-pipe on a Segway.

The New Worlds Mission is already trying to get funding for this, but NASA sponsored their proposal, so it will be hard to catch the telescope people by surprise with it.

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

Thank you to linguist Gretchen McCulloch for teaching me about phonetic assimilation, and for teaching me that if you stand around in public reading texts from a linguist and murmuring example phrases to yourself, people will eventually ask if you're okay.

Many a hungry time traveler has Googled 'trilobites shellfish allergy' only to find their carrier had no coverage in the Ordovician.

Usain Bolt holds the world record in the 100 meter speedrun.

I'm really worried Christopher Nolan will kill a man dressed like a bat in his next movie. (The man will be dressed like a bat, I mean. Christopher Nolan won't be, probably.)

You'd need to keep track of so many people! Would you use, like, Excel or something? Far too fancy for a simple country nanoenzyme developer like me.

I don't care whether you win or lose, as long as you have-- ...okay, sorry, I'm being reminded I very much care whether you win or lose. I need you to win, that's very important.

Poisson distributions have no value over negative numbers

Son, don't try to play 'make you feel bad' with the Michael Jordan of making you feel bad.

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

For those of you also taking Game Theory, your grade in that class will be based on how close your grade on this exam is to 80% of the average.

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.

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.

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

'Ugh, I'm never going to be like spiders. My descendants will all just be normal arthropods who mind their own busines and don't do anything weird.' --The ancestor of a bunch of eusocial insects

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

Plus, when someone finally grabs your glasses and stomps on them, it costs way less than $1,500 to replace them.

At least there's a general understanding all around that Doctor Who is its own thing.

Eventual headline: 'University Researchers Create Life in Lab! Darkness, Faulty Condoms Blamed.'

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!"

Lucky. In MY dream, all the people who grew up loving The Giving Tree paired up with all the students who had weird dreams after reading The Metamorphosis. That one was more confusing.

Oh, weird, Amazon is out of butterfly nets.

The combination croquet set/10-lane pool can also be used for some varieties of foosball and Skee-Ball.

I mean, we already live in a world of flying robots killing people. I don't worry about how powerful the machines are, I worry about who the machines give power to.

That's my hat! You took my hat!

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

Before you say anything, no, I know not to leave my computer sitting out logged in to all my accounts. I have it set up so after a few minutes of inactivity it automatically switches to my brother's.

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

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

We need some grub to munch--I'll go slouch over to the kitchen.

I started off with countless problems. But now I know, thanks to COUNT(), that I have "#REF! ERROR: Circular dependency detected" problems.

You can do a lot better than 1% if you start keeping track of the patterns in what numbers people pick.

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

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

Here at CompanyName.website, our three main strengths are our web-facing chairs, our huge collection of white papers, and the fact that we physically cannot die.

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.

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

I tried uploading it to a household appliance porn site I found, but apparently their content is limited to only fans.

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

Sure, you could just ask, but this also takes care of the host gift thing.

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

If you're really savvy, you can hide an entire set of illicit transactions by timing them to draw what looks like a graph inset.

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

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.

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!

Roundly-condemned headlinese initiative shuttered indefinitely.

November marks the birthday of Charles Schulz, pioneer of tongue awareness.

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

HISTORIANS: We've decided to trim the past down to make things more manageable. Using BCE/CE, would you rather we lose the odd-numbered or even-numbered years?

Fun game: find a combination of two items that most freaks out the cashier. Winner: pregnancy test and single coat hanger.

As if these problems weren't NP-hard enough.

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

Hey, at least I ran out of staples.

Okay, I'm just gonna order pizza, and let's never talk about this again.

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.

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

The establishment doesn't take us seriously. You know who else they didn't take seriously? Hitler. I'll be like him, but a GOOD guy instead of...

About one in three North American subway stops are in NYC.

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

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

I'm going to change the sign so the pole is horizontal and the sign is mounted on the front like a plunger, so I can carry it around like a lance to gently push people back if they try to approach.

Yeah, my math teacher back in high school set up the system to try to teach us something or other, but the 100% rate was unbelievably good, so I engineered a hostile takeover of his bank and now use it to make extra cash on the side.

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

Not sure why I just taught everyone to flawlessly impersonate me to pretty much anyone I know. Just remember to constantly bring up how cool it is that birds are dinosaurs and you'll be set.

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

We had gathered that raw information, but had yet to put it all together.

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

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...?

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

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.

Guest comic by Bill Amend of FoxTrot, an inspiration to all us nerdy-physics-majors-turned-cartoonists, of which there are an oddly large number.

It's actually worst in people who study the Dunning–Kruger effect. We tried to organize a conference on it, but the only people who would agree to give the keynote were random undergrads.

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

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

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

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

It's a beautiful day in the neighborhood!

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!

'Is it worth anything?' 'I dunno, is the answer to that question worth another $5?'

'Now, minions, I'm off to inspect our shark cages.' 'Do you really need to inspect them this often?' 'PRISONERS MUST NEVER ESCAPE.'

I feel bad for Earth 2 and their shadowflies.

On the other hand, physicists like to say physics is to math as sex is to masturbation.

Visual checks suggest the cool bird has exited the launch zone. Tip the rocket sideways and resume the countdown--we're gonna go find it!

U+FDD0 is actually Unicode for the eye of the basilisk, though for safety reasons no font actually renders it.

I have accidentally watered virtually every person and object in Pelican Town.

We were going to do a falling-apart Rubik's cube that was just 27 independent blocks stuck together with magnets, but then we realized it was actually really cool and even kind of worked, so we cut that one.

I like trying to make it as hard as possible. "I'd love to meet up, maybe in a few days? Next week is looking pretty empty. *witchcraft"

Wait till they notice the faint reflection of Michael Jordan and Bugs Bunny in the E-mode.

I am not making this rule up. Although my mom wants you all to know it made perfect sense at the time.

The zoo takes special care to keep kings separated from opposite-color pieces as part of their conservation program to prevent mating in captivity.

Their signature play is the three-point combinator, a recursive offense which is guaranteed not to halt and continues accumulating points until the buzzer.

Everyone's caught by surprise when a theory of quantum gravity is developed by a sound technician wearing patent leather shoes while editing Clerks II.

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.

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.

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

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

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

Now that I've finally gotten an electric vehicle, I'm never going back to an acoustic one.

You might think most people you know are reliable voters, or that your nudge won't convince them, and you will usually be right. But some small but significant percentage of the time, you'll be wrong, and that's why this works.

There's also a Katamari level where everything is just slightly bigger than you, and a Mario level with a star just out of reach.

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

It's depressing how many of these are real shirts

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

We definitely put the pool in a mine for shielding. It was absolutely not to hide it from the funding people.

The only downside is that it would be a little uncomfortable

This was my friend David's idea

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.

Some future reader, who may see the term, without knowing the history of it, may imagine that it had reference to some antiquated bridge of the immortal Poet, thrown across the silver Avon, to facilitate his escape after some marauding excursion in a neighbouring park; and in some Gentleman's Magazine of the next century, it is not impossible, but that future antiquaries may occupy page after page in discussing so interesting a matter. We think it right, therefore, to put it on record in the Oriental Herald that the 'Shakesperian Rope Bridges' are of much less classic origin; that Mr Colin Shakespear, who, besides his dignity as Postmaster, now signs himself 'Superintendent General of Shakesperian Rope Bridges', is a person of much less genius than the Bard of Avon. --The Oriental Herald, 1825

When advertisers figure this out, our only weapon will be blue sharpies and "[disputed]".

Our anti-de Sitter club is small at the moment, but I've started corresponding with the conformal field theory people.

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.

Further out to the right, it works correctly, but the reason it works still involves the word 'firmware.'

That's actually the original Japanese version of A Million Random Digits, which is much better than the American remake the book was based on.

How could you choose avoiding a little pain over understanding a magic lightning machine?

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

When I was a kid, I asked my parents why our houses didn't have toothpaste pipes in addition to water ones. I'm strangely pleased to see Amazon thinking the same way.

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

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

Nonrewritable tape?

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.

Ok, well, we'll be sure to pay you sometime soon, geologically speaking.

That shirt looks good on you, but it would look even better stuffed into the neck of a vodka bottle and flung burning through our office building's window. Let's fucking do it and never look back.

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

We've almost finished constructing the piña collider.

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

Although really, the damage was done when the party planners took the hole punch to the elevator ribbon to hang up the sign.

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

The good news is that if the number of work and friend relationships you have exceeds your willingness to do the bare minimum to keep up with everyone's life events and stuff, one way or another that problem eventually solves itself.

Man, there's future *everywhere*.

Speed limit c arcminutes^2 per steradian

As of this writing the NASA/JPL websites are still overloaded. Trying CURIOSITY-REAR-CAM_[256px_x_256px].torrent.SwEsUb.DVDRip.XviD-aXXo.jpg instead.

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

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

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

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

I got banned from the county fair for handing out Helium-2 balloons. Apparently the instant massive plasma explosions violated some local ordinance or something.

All electromagnetic equations: The same as all fluid dynamics equations, but with the 8 and 23 replaced with the permittivity and permeability of free space, respectively.

NASA prefers to say that their rovers are 'looking for signs of past life on Mars' and not 'ghost hunting.'

Moments later, the White Witch rolls up and, confused, tries to tempt the probe with a firmware upgrade.

CORRECTION: After careful evaluation, we have determined that the axis label on this chart was printed backward.

No white guy who's been mentioned on Twitter has gone on to win.

Are you still there, server? It's me, Margaret.

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

If so great a deductive mind as Arthur Conan Doyle can be fooled by the Cottingley Deepfakes, what chance do we mortals have? Soon our very reality will be dictated by the whims of Frances (9) and Elsie (16).

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.

Guest comic by Jeffrey Rowland of Overcompensating/Wigu. Jeffrey is famous as the picture on the Wikipedia article on 'Necrosis'.

We don't need to do a clinical trial of this change because the standard of care is to adopt new ideas without doing clinical trials.

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.

If you get an 11/100 on a CS test, but you claim it should be counted as a 'C', they'll probably decide you deserve the upgrade.

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.

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.

Every place has a local cryptid; more places need a local Pictish Beast, a creature in historical art that's drawn so weirdly that no one can tell what animal it's supposed to be.

Some people argue that the tension and compression in the human skeleton is technically tensegrity, but it's missing the defining characteristic: making people say 'wtf, how is that thing floating?' when they see it.

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

An occasional source of mild Thanksgiving tension in my family is that my mother is a die-hard fan of The Core (2003), and various family members sometimes have differing levels of enthusiasm for her annual tradition of watching it.

The Stroop-YORP number of a scientific paper is how many of the 16 finalist names (sans 'effect') it manages to casually sneak into the text.

I always figured the word 'blog' would sound *less* silly as the years went by.

Their calculations show it will 'pass within the distance of the moon' but that it 'will not hit the moon, so what's the point?'

"This will take a while, which sucks, because I'm already so busy chiseling out igneous intrusions from rock formations and watching Youtube loops of the Superman fault-sealing scene over and over."

If you read all vaguebooking/vaguetweeting with the assumption that they're saying everything they can without revealing classified military information, the internet gets way more exciting.

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

The days of the week are Monday, Arctic, Wellesley, Green, Electra, Synergize, and the Seventh Seal.

The presents under the tree are actually a single gift connected by an underground ribbon system.

I hear once you've worked there for 256 days they teach you the secret of levitation.

I mean, seriously, NOWHERE? For starters, there are like a thousand species of dinosaur.

Evidence suggests the 1899 transactions occurred as part of a global event centered around a deity associated with the lotus flower.

You know when you can't hear your speakers, and you keep turning various volume controls up higher and higher in confusion, and then someone hits the mute button and there's a deafening blast of sound? That's basically what happened at Chernobyl.

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

"Ok, team. We have a little under 10,000 years before closest approach to figure out how to destroy Barnard's Star." "Why, does it pose a threat to the Solar System?" "No. It's just an asshole."

I never trust anyone who's more excited about success than about doing the thing they want to be successful at.

I hope we can stop them

After decades of studying the curve and the procedure that generates it, the consensus explanation is "it's just like that."

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.

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.

I need an extension for my research project because I spent all month trying to figure out whether learning Dvorak would help me type it faster.

You know what they say: mRNA-1273 before tozinameran, you'll have to slay a banshee in a catamaran.

'Are you stealing those LCDs?' 'Yeah, but I'm doing it while my code compiles.'

But then the Ghost of Subjunctive Past showed up and told me to stay strong on 'if it were'.

I'm trying to be healthier, so after I eat this brick of cheese, I'll have a spoonful of grease-soaked vegetables.

I'm the proud parent of an honor student, and the person driving me is proud, too!

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

Also on the agenda: what's with his hips?

"Sir, it looked really cool." "Oh no--prestige TV. Okay, which of you has a terrible secret that's being slowly revealed to the audience through flashbacks? Just spit it out so we can escape this arc!"

'Garbage In, Garbage Out' should not be taken to imply any sort of conservation law limiting the amount of garbage produced.

'It's either 'your mom' jokes or me' 'Then I, like so many men before me, must reluctantly choose your mom.'

cerebrospinal fluid, pericardial fluid, sputum, aqueous humor, perilymph, chyme, hydatid fluid, interstitial fluid, rheum, and gin.

Wikipedia's role as brain-extension, while a little troubling, is also really cool.

I love the title-text!

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

While weather control is typically thought of as a superpower, the unconscious ability of astronomers and astrophotographers to summon clouds is more properly classified as a curse.

At the bottom left: The mystery of why, when I know I needed to be asleep an hour ago, I decide it's a good time to read through every Wikipedia article in the categories 'Out-of-place artifacts', 'Earth mysteries', 'Anomalous weather', and 'List of people who disappeared mysteriously'.

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

Thanks for bringing us along.

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.

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

No more, no less

[20 minutes later] ", hi."

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.

2078: He announces that he's finally making the jump from screen+irssi to tmux+weechat.

'TMI' he whispered, gazing into the sea.

For the sake of simplicity, gardeners are assumed to move through Euclidean space--neglecting the distortion from general relativity--unless they are in the vicinity of a Schwarzschild Orchid.

We watched DAYTIME TV. Do you realize how soul-crushing it was? I'd rather eat an iPad than go back to watching daytime TV.

Household tip: Tired of buying so much toilet paper? Try unspooling the paper from the roll before using it. A single roll can last for multiple days that way, and it's much easier on your plumbing.

Asbestos is bad; definitely get the one on the right. Wait -- this one over here has no swine flu! Now I can't decide.

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

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

The top computer champion at Seven Minutes in Heaven is a Honda-built Realdoll, but to date it has been unable to outperform the human Seven Minutes in Heaven champion, Ken Jennings.

Quick, try it with 'LOVE'.

Why did we even have that thing?

The phantom found Edward Everett Hale a century too early; by the time we invented satellites, the specifics of his 'brick moon' proposal were dismissed as science fiction.

Better change the URL to 'https' before downloading.

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

I've decided to score all my conversations using chess win-loss notation. (??)

Anyone who thinks we're all going to spend the 2032 elections poring over rambling blog posts by teenagers has never tried to read a rambling blog post by a teenager.

The HVAC bill for installing the Gulf Stream was enormous.

Since we haven't really settled on a name for those online hangout/work spaces that try to recreate the experience of cafes, and I love confusion, I'm going to start calling them 'cyber cafes' or 'internet cafes.'

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

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

Disclaimer: I have not actually tried the beta yet. I hear it's quite pleasant and hardly Hitler-y at all.

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

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.

The Earth's magnetic field is primarily generated by currents in the liquid outer core, though some geophysicists argue that an unexplained mismatch with models suggests that the Kinder toy contains a magnet.

The use of the 'Garfield' character for the purposes of this parody qualifies as fair use under the Copyright Act of 1976, 17 U.S.C. sec. 107. See Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music (92-1292), 510 U.S. 569

On the plus side, she wrote 'Welcome to the AAA Club!' in lipstick on the bathroom mirror, and left me a membership/roadside assistance card on the counter.

I'm just trying to explain, please don't be jealous! Man, why are all my relationships ruined by early 90's rappers?

If you think this is too hard on literary criticism, read the Wikipedia article on deconstruction.

For years, I took the wrong lesson from that Monster Cable experiment and only listened to my music through alligator-clipped coat hangers.

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

[after typing 1,500 words on feathered dinosaurs, paleontology, sexism, lava, and dinosaurs as animals rather than movie monsters] Sorry to cut it short, I'm on my phone. When I'm back at a keyboard, I can give you another 5,000 words.

Also, if you read his speech at Rice, all his arguments for going to the moon work equally well as arguments for blowing up the moon, sending cloned dinosaurs into space, or constructing a towering penis-shaped obelisk on Mars.

Serve one each to guests whose last cursed cocktail was more than 2 months ago.

Can this PLEASE be drawing with replacement?

Haha, you'll see!

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.

Some engineer out there has solved P=NP and it's locked up in an electric eggbeater calibration routine. For every 0x5f375a86 we learn about, there are thousands we never see.

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

We also should really have checked that the old water tower was disconnected from the water system before we started filling it with compressed air.

Did he just go crazy and jump out the window?

Cracked.com is another inexplicable browser narcotic. They could write a list of '17 worst haircuts in the Ottoman Empire' and I'd read through to the end, then click on all the links at the end.

I've always wondered whether you could drink slowly enough, and eliminate fast enough, that you just sort of peed continuously. But I'm afraid to try because I worry someone might call while I'm doing it and ask what I'm up to, and I won't be able to think of a lie.

I used to do this all the time.

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

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

They also showed activation in the parts of the brain associated with exposure to dubious study methodology, concern about unremoved piercings, and exasperation with fMRI techs who won't stop talking about Warped Tour.

Hypothermia of below 98.6 K should be treated by leaving the giant molecular cloud and moving to the vicinity of a star.

'We're not sure how to wipe out the chimeral T-cells after they've destroyed the cancer. Though I do have this vial of smallpox ...'

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

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

Verbiage. Va-jay-jay. Irregardless.

Update: It turns out the cannon has a motorized base, and can make holes just fine using the barrel itself as a battering ram. But due to design constraints it won't work without a projectile loaded in, so we still need those drills.

Oh, look, the 'make everything better' button was here behind the bookshelf all along.

What's weirder is that muons turned out to be INCREDIBLY cute.

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.

Even the powerful, tart Granny Smith cultivar is proving ineffective against new Gran-negative doctors.

Where did you even get this wall? Return it there and stand it back up right now.

'Drama' is just 'people being upset', when someone says they're always surrounded by drama and they just ignore it, it starts to make sense that their strategy might be backfiring.

Frankly, given their extreme gravitational fields and general instability, even 12-inch globes should probably be banned.

Kids are genetic experiments. We're just experimenting responsibly!

Hey, man, the 1670s called. They were like 'Wherefore this demonic inſtrument? By what ſorcery does it produce ſuch ſounds?"

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

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

Never give your password or bank account number to anyone who doesn't have a blue check mark next to their name.

Force-choking the chicken.

'And ovaries. Man, ovaries, huh?' [awkward pause] '... faithfully.'

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

It gets worse! You know that wizened old monk with the gypsy wife whose voodoo shop we smash up every day after school?

'That was definitely not in my top three wishes.' 'Who said anything about YOUR wishes?'

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

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

I don't get it. The peak acceleration for passengers was WAY lower than in the giant-waterslide-loop-the-loop incident the other cruise line fired me for.

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.

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

The Carnot cycle is more properly known by its full title, the "Carnot-Tolkien-Wagner Ring Cycle."

Freestyle rapping is basically applied Markov chains.

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

Just thought you should know

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

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

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

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

Remember, models aren't for telling you facts, they're for exploring dynamics. This model apparently explores time travel.

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.

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?'

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

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

P.S. If you have time travel, come to my birthday party Saturday!

Elon Musk finally blocked me from the internal Tesla repository because I wouldn't stop sending pull requests for my code supporting steering via vim keybindings.

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

If you shrank the Solar System to the size of Texas, the Houston metro area would be smaller than a grasshopper in Dallas.

When I was looking at the box, I should have thought more about what "360 degrees of freedom" meant.

A human is a system for converting dust billions of years ago into dust billions of years from now via a roundabout process which involves checking email a lot.

I never got around to seeing that movie about the battle (of Midway).

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

Why do all my attempts at science end with me being punched by Batman? (P.S. benzoyl peroxide soap works great.)

It also occasionally replies with 'Comment of the year', 'Are you for real', and 'I'm taking a screenshot so I can remember this moment forever'.

I didn't even realize they MADE a novelization of "Surf Ninjas." How did you-- Oh my god, it's signed by the author?!

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

Add main-belt asteroids to taste.

This one is from the Red Belt collection, of 'medium' difficulty.

The only post to achieve perfect balance between the four was a hilarious joke about Mark Zuckerberg getting caught using a pseudonym to sneak past the TSA.

During launch, in the event of an unexpected sensor reading, SafetySat will extend prongs in all directions to secure itself and any other cubesats safely in the launch vehicle until the source of the problem can be determined.

I was actually a little relieved when I learned that JPEG2000 was used in the DCI digital cinema standard. I was feeling so bad for it!

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

Guest comic by David Troupes of Buttercup Festival, who is living in that lovely tree outside your window.

That was quicker than usual! The cabin's sprinkler system often makes it really hard to keep anything lit.

This is actually pencil on paper, just inverted and colored

Contains 100% of your recommended daily allowance!

Update: I've been banned from the physics department for the way I pronounce "Doppler effect."

Every downhill walk is a waterslide that might have been.

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

The arbiter gave my knight a red card for capturing with cleats up :(

The cycle seems to be 'we need these symbols to clarify what types of things we're referring to!' followed by 'wait, it turns out words already do that.'

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

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

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

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.

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

You can also try 'Yikes.'

Revised directive: It is forbidden for you to interfere with human history until you've at least taken a class on it.

I adopted a cat that weighs 12 solar masses. Laser pointers love chasing it.

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

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

No, we actually do have a woman who's basically part of our fellowship. She lives in Rivendell, you wouldn't know her.

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

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

More actual results: 'Hello. My name is Inigo Montoya. You [are the best. The best thing ever]', 'Revenge is a dish best served [by a group of people in my room]', and 'They may take our lives, but they'll never take our [money].'

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

Our company is agile and lean with a focus on the long tail. Ok, our company is actually a polecat I found in my backyard.

I understand large sample sizes are key to a low standard error of the mean, but the entire sophomore class?

Since the goatee, glasses, and Seltzer & Friedberg DVD collection didn't tip you off, there will be a $20 negligence charge for this service.

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

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

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

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

And if you labeled your axes, I could tell you exactly how MUCH better.

Can't and shouldn't.

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

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

Oh no, my marshmallow became tidally locked!

Sorry, I've just always had these random things I don't like--like olives, or robots drilling holes in me without warning.

I would say time is definitely one of my top three favorite dimensions.

It's important for devices to have internet connectivity so the manufacturer can patch remote exploits.

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.

The penis varies in size when flaccid and is pretty consistently about yea big when erect. Anyway, back to the sitcom one-liners and the constant flow of spam.

The bruises on my fingertips are my proof of work.