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

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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.

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

Running for office in Minnesota on the single-issue platform 'dig a permanent channel through the Traverse Gap because it will make this map more satisfying.'

If you encounter a hex bolt, but you only brought screwdrivers, you can try sandwiching the head of the bolt between two parallel screwdriver shafts, squeezing the screwdrivers together with a hand at either end, then twisting. It doesn't work and it's a great way to hurt yourself, but you can try it!

These rocks are from a time before eyes, brains, and bones, pieces of a land warmed by an unseen sun.

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

Guest comic by Jeph Jacques of Questionable Content, whose internal monologue hasn't been speaking to him for the past three years.

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

Haunted Halloween masks from a mysterious costume shop that turn you evil and grow into your skin score a surprisingly high 80% filtration efficiency in R. L. Stine-sponsored NIOSH tests.

These are all sans-serif compounds. Serif compounds are dramatically different and usually much more reactive.

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

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

There's also a unicode-handling bug in the URL request library, and we're storing the passwords unsalted ... so if we salt them with emoji, we can close three issues at once!

My Redwall/Jurassic Park crossover fanfic is almost complete!

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

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

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.

After a while, the squirrel starts making that beeping noise and doesn't stop until it hops back up onto the stump.

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.

'I was pretty good at skeet shooting, but was eventually kicked off the range for catching the clay pigeons in a net and dispatching them execution-style.'

Nature abhors a vacuum and also anything that's not a crab.

Unfortunately, body size and bite force continue to increase.

Starting a meta-leaderboard for tracking who holds the record for ranking behind the most distinct people on an online leaderboard.

I was there, dude.

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

Do YOU remember the skylight being this big?

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

(It's the TMBG Dial-a-Song line, to save you some time.)

No, the best things about The Sarah Connor Chronicles were: (1) watching Sarah and Cameron try to pass for normal, and (2) Cameron throwing people and things through walls. Everything else was pretty secondary.

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

I mean, I can barely hear myself complaining about Battlestar Galactica.

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

"This seems more like a way to attract turkey vultures." "My mom always told me a turkey vulture is just a friend you haven't met yet, usually because you don't smell enough like decaying meat."

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

Once they selected the other proposal, we could have kept shopping ours around, but we would had to modify it include an aqueduct over their canal, which would be totally unreasonable.

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

'Does the substance feel weird to the touch?' is equally likely to get the answers 'Don't be ridiculous, you would never put your hand near a sample. We have safety protocols.' and 'Yeah, and it tastes AWFUL.'

I'm still waiting for a chance to use 'I have to see a man about a horse'.

Using diacritics correctly is not my forté.

I'm glad modern car washes use synthetic baleen, instead of harvesting it from whales like 1800s car washes did.

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.

I'm not saying it's all bad, but that movie has not aged as well as my teenage self in 2000 was confident it would.

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

Having a positive attitude is almost tautologically good for your mental health, and extreme stress can hurt your immune system, but that doesn't mean you should feel like shit for feeling like shit.

We've learned that weird spacing and diacritics in the methodology description are apparently the key to good research; luckily, we've developed an AI tool to help us figure out where to add them.

I thought of another bad opinion! I couldn't find anyone who expressed it specifically, but still, the fact that I can so easily imagine it is infuriating! I'm gonna tell everyone about it!

He sees you when you're sleeping, he knows when you're awake, he's copied on /var/spool/mail/root, so be good for goodness' sake.

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

Cloud computing has a ways to go.

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

We didn't believe you at first, but we asked like three people who were at that party. They not only corroborated your story, but even said you totally mentioned wanting to start a company someday. Sorry! If this isn't enough money, let us know.

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

You know that I'll never leave you. Not as long as she's with someone.

And if you drive a typical car more than a mile out of your way for each penny you save on the per-gallon price, it doesn't matter how worthless your time is to you--the gas to get you there and back costs more than you save.

An eternity later, the universe having turned out to have positive curvature and lots of mass, the boomerang hits him in the back of the head.

All those GTA marathons during the pregnancy were a bad idea.

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

There's also nothing in the TOSes that says you can't let a dog play baseball in the server room!

"Off-by-one errors" isn't the easiest theme to build a party around, but I've seen worse.

I think I accidentally installed an Overton window in my bedroom. A few months ago, the sun wasn't in my face in the morning, but now it is.

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

Help, I set my white balance wrong and suddenly everyone is screaming at each other about whether they've been to Colorado.

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.

We actually stand around the antivirus displays with the Mac users just waiting for someone to ask.

It would be pretty unfair to give to someone a blank version of this map as a 'how many states can you name?' quiz. (If you include Alaska and Hawaii, you should swap the Aleutian Islands with the Hawaiian ones.)

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

Our investigation into whining-based remedies became the first study to be halted by the IRB on the grounds that the treatment group was 'too annoying.'

If you got a big keyspace, let me search it.

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

This sequence was later reproduced in the International Tape-Extending Federation archives, retitled 'The Founding of the Sport'.

NASA tries to coordinate launch timing with the Care Bears' cloud castle, but unfortunately sometimes collisions with stray Care Bears are unavoidable, so they just try to make the fairings sturdy and hope for a glancing impact.

This is probably the first projection in cartographic history that can be criticized for its disproportionate focus on Finland, Mongolia, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

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

Hopefully the HVAC people set it to only affect the AIR in the room.

If the first audio they downlink is from the descent, we probably won't be able to hear anything over the sound of the rover screaming.

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.

Just make sure all your friends and family are out of the car, or that you've made backup friends and family at home.

Menu -> Manage -> [Optimize space usage, Encrypt disk usage report, Convert photos to text-only, Delete temporary files, Delete permanent files, Delete all files currently in use, Optimize menu options, Download cloud, Optimize cloud , Upload unused space to cloud]

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.

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

And on the pedestal these words appear: "And on the pedestal these words appear: "And on the pedestal these words appear: "And ...

'Why don't you just point it at their eye directly?' 'What is this, 2007?'

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

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

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

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.

Supercollider? I 'ardly know 'er!

Tonight's top story: Lucifer, the Prince of Darkness, died in his home this morning at the age of [unintelligible rune]. Due to the large number of sharks inhabiting his former kingdom, no body could be recovered.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A really mean prank you can play on someone who's picky about words is to add a 'definitely->definitively' autocorrect rule to their keyboard.

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

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

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

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

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>.

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

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

Are you ok? Do you need help?

I'm so glad NASA let you take your phone to Mars!

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

At least 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?'

To make your shoes feel more comfortable, smell better, and last longer, try taking them off before you shower.

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.

Look, recipe, if I knew how much was gonna taste good, I wouldn't need you.

At first I didn't get why they were warning me about all those birds sitting on the wire, but then I understood.

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

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.

Wavefunction collapse is only one interpretation. Under some interpretations, graduate students also have souls.

Man, there's future *everywhere*.

Roundly-condemned headlinese initiative shuttered indefinitely.

Using a classic Timothy Zahn EU/Legends novel is bad enough, but at least the style and setting aren't too far off. If you really want to mess with people, try using Splinter of the Mind's Eye.

It's frustrating to calibrate your precautions when there's only one kind of really definitive feedback you can get, you can only get it once, and when you do it's too late.

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

... okay, but because you said that, we're breaking up.

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

People may complain about readability, but even with jpeg compression, extracting the data points is usually computationally feasible if there aren't too many of them.

There are so many well-meaning conservatives around here who just assume global warming is only presented as a moral issue for political reasons.

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!

Don't turn it on.

i love you

The universe fandom is great. Such sweet and enthusiastic people.

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

"And in maritime news, the Coast Guard is on the scene today after an apparent collision between two lighthouses."

"Since there's no ending quote mark, everything after this is part of my quote. —Randall Munroe

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.

Thank you for teaching us how big our world is by sharing so many of your own.

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

A tribute to Buttercup Festival

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.

Welcome to the International Space Station Exclamation Point!

Some of the KBCU ancillary works try a little too hard to tie everything together. Doris Kearns Goodwin, the sports journalist featured in "Baseball," was somehow ALSO a famous historian who wrote bestselling biographies of Lincoln AND Johnson? Unrealistic.

The problem with perspective is that it's bidirectional.

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

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

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

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

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.

Oh right, eye contact. Ok, good, holding the eye contact ... holding ... still holding ... ok, too long! Getting weird! Quick, look thoughtfully into space and nod. Oh, dammit, said 'yeah' again!

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.

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

I'm staring at the "doctor" section, and I can't help but feel like I've forgotten someone.

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

'The zero line in WMM2025 passes through a lot of population centers; I wonder what year the largest share of the population lived in a zone of less than 5° of declination,' he thought, derailing all other tasks for the rest of the day.

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

To combat the threat, many airlines are installing wing-mounted spray bottles.

There's a supposed Mark Twain quote, "The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco." It isn't really by Mark Twain, but I don't know who said it—I just know they've never been to McMurdo Station.

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

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

(six hours later) ARGH. How are these stupid microchips so durable?! All I want is to undo a massive industrial process with household tools!

After exhausting the OED, we started numbering them. When overlapping hurricanes formed at all points on the Earth's surface, and our scheme was foiled by Cantor diagonalization, we just decided to name them all "Steve". Your local forecast tomorrow is "Steve". Good luck.

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.

That's my hat! You took my hat!

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

I hear that these days Bill Watterson is happy just painting in the Ohio woods with his father and doesn't get any mail or talk to anyone.

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

Cue letters from anthropology majors complaining that this view of numerolinguistic development perpetuates a widespread myth. They get to write letters like that because when you're not getting a real science degree you have a lot of free time. Zing!

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

Click and drag.

Adding data for South Korea but with their cases scaled to match the population of Japan and the land area of Australia, and vice versa.

It's so sad how almost no one alive today can remember seeing the galactic rainbow, the insanity nebula, or the skull and glowing eyes of the Destroyer of Sagittarius.

I searched my .bash_history for the line with the highest ratio of special characters to regular alphanumeric characters, and the winner was: cat out.txt | grep -o "[[(].*[])][^)]]*$" ... I have no memory of this and no idea what I was trying to do, but I sure hope it worked.

Inside is a third box, labeled DO NOT OPEN UNLESS YOU ARE IN THE TIME ZONE WHERE YOU OPENED BOTH PREVIOUS BOXES.

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!

Well, sex is like a velociraptor: despite your movie-fueled lifelong neurotic obsession, unlikely to be found in your house.

When the results are published, no one will be sure whether to report on them again.

'Oh, and can I borrow 50 sacks of loose flour, a pile of lithium-ion batteries, a bucket of bleach, and a bucket of vinega--' 'NO!!!!!!'

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

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

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

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

P.P.S. I can kill you with my brain.

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

The only big difference I've seen is in colors. Where the regular text reads 'press red button', the braille reads 'press two-inch button'.

I've looked through a few annotated versions of classic books, and it's shocking how much of what's in there is basically pop-culture references totally lost on us now.

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

That card holds a refrigerator carton's worth of floppy discs, and a soda can full of those cards could hold the entire iTunes store's music library. Mmmm.

It's depressing how many of these are real shirts

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.

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

Hell, my eighth grade science class managed to conclusively reject it just based on a classroom experiment. It's pretty sad to hear about million-dollar research teams who can't even manage that.

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

My trash can broke recently and I had to get rid of it. When I picked it up, I suffered a brief but harrowing existential crisis.

To be fair, the braised and confused newt on a bed of crushed Doritos turned out to be delicious.

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

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

Wow, ANIMORPHS-NOVEL.RTF? Just gonna, uh, go through and delete that from all my archives real quick.

Sorry, in SI units that's "there's a big football in there."

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

A mix of the two is even worse: 'Thanks for unsubscribing and helping us pare this list down to reliable supporters.'

If it falls below 20% full, my bag turns red and I start to panic.

It has so many advantages--it preserves Martian life, requires fewer interplanetary launches, and makes it much easier to field-test Mars rovers.

After reading Slashdot and BoingBoing, sometimes I have to go outside.

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

I sort of wish my texting app showed the percentage next to each person, but also sort of don't want to know.

In contrast to the deep booming sound associated with the cannon in pop culture depictions, recent studies show it actually made more of a 'toot toot!' noise.

Maybe you should keep FEWER backups; it sounds like throwing away everything you've done and starting from scratch might not be the worst idea.

The most important quantity for meteorologists is of course the product of latent pressure and temperostrophic enthalpy, though 'how nice the weather is' is a close second.

<3 If there's anything you can do, I'll let you know. For the moment, any simple distracting online games sent to sick@xkcd.com will not go unappreciated [EDIT: Holy crap 2,700 games before noon. I love you guys; thank you. They will be passed along and played by us all.]

Delaware hopes to explore the western edge of areas marked with the Belgian flag, once the tornadoes die down.

Applying renormalization to bullies successfully transformed Pete & Pete's Endless Mike into Finite Mike.

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

Fine, we can go search the Himalayas for the Yeti ONE more time, but keep a safe altitude over the Pacific and PLEASE watch where you're going. We can't afford another Amelia Earhart incident.

Your homeowner's insurance might cover it, but be sure to check the subductible.

'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 ...'

You say no human would reply to a forum thread about Tom Bombadil by writing and editing hundreds of words of text, complete with formatting, fancy punctuation, and two separate uses of the word 'delve'. Unfortunately for both of us, you are wrong.

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.

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

They had BETTER make this a sample return mission.

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

I'm like the Terminator, except with love!

People aren't going to change, for better or for worse. Technology's going to be so cool. All in all, the future will be okay! Except climate; we fucked that one up.

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.

This was always going to be a controversial Wirecutter post, but what really got them in trouble were their 'budget' and 'upgrade' picks.

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!

We can do this.

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

It's great for exfoliating your skin, bones, houses, cities, landscape, etc.

Or so I hope?

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.

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

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

ALERT: Some pending mandatory software updates require version 21.1.2 of the Oracle/Sun Java(tm) JDK(tm) Update Manager Runtime Environment Meta-Updater, which is not available for your platform.

My thighs have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord?

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

Science tip: Scientists hardly ever use the two-dot division sign, and when they do it often doesn't even mean division, but they still get REALLY mad when you repurpose it to write stuff like SALE! ALL SHOES 30÷ OFF!

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

Could be worse. In some towns north of here, it's already December, and the 21st will last for nearly a week.

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

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

Phylogeneticists are working on identifying and notifying its next of kin.

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

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

I'M PLUGGING IN MY PHONE BUT THE BATTERY ON THE SCREEN ISN'T CHARGING

And sometimes I use it to retaliate against the guy upstairs with the loud girlfriend and the elliptical dish.

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.

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.

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

At least they're not alone down there.

I also managed to improve the solution for n=1 to s<0.97, and with some upgrades I think I can hit 0.96.

Sure, T. rex is closer in height to Stegosaurus than a sparrow. But that doesn't tell you much; 'Dinosaur Comics' author Ryan North is closer in height to certain dinosaurs than to the average human.

...an effect size of 1.68 (95% CI: 1.56 (95% CI: 1.52 (95% CI: 1.504 (95% CI: 1.494 (95% CI: 1.488 (95% CI: 1.485 (95% CI: 1.482 (95% CI: 1.481 (95% CI: 1.4799 (95% CI: 1.4791 (95% CI: 1.4784...

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

Changing the names would be easier, but if you're not comfortable lying, try only making friends with people named Alice, Bob, Carol, etc.

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

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

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.

And thus was smallpox introduced into the previously Undying Lands.

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.

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

Better change the URL to 'https' before downloading.

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

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

I always figured you should never bring a gun to a gun fight because then you'll be part of a gun fight.

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

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

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

Doug's cousin, the one from London, runs a Bumble love cult.

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

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

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.

RFC 1149.5 specifies 4 as the standard IEEE-vetted random number.

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.

When designing an interface, imagine that your program is all that stands between the user and hot, sweaty, tangled-bedsheets-fingertips-digging-into-the-back sex.

My shooting will improve over the short term, but over the long term the universe will take more shots.

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.

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 git vehicle fleet eventually pivoted to selling ice cream, but some holdovers remain. If you flag down an ice cream truck and hand the driver a floppy disk, a few hours later you'll get an invite to a git repo.

They're really the worst tech support team. And their solutions are always the same. "This OS X update broke something." "LET'S INFILTRATE APPLE BY MORPHING APPLES!"

Calling a cab means cutting into beer money.

You can search it if you want, but you may want to skip the memories of your mom.

If you live in Los Angeles (around 33°52'N, roughly the latitude of Hermosa Beach) the black hole in V404 Cygni passes over you each day. On Christmas Day it will be directly overhead around 2pm.

The installation of the pipes on the inside of the insulation can be challenging, especially when the neighbor could come home at any minute.

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

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

SEMI-PROTECT THE CONSTITUTION

Constantly stopping these briefings halfway through is becoming a pain.

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.

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

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

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

General solutions get you a 50% tip.

Good luck to Democrats in the upcoming Georgia runoff elections, and to the Google Sheets SREs in the current run-on elections.

You know that 'sweep the pieces off the board and see it in your mind' thing? Doesn't work.

ADDITIONAL NOTES: Fixed a bug that caused some rocks to generate virtually infinite heat while just sitting there.

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

The end.

Wait, forgot to escape a space. Wheeeeee[taptaptap]eeeeee.

The 1919 Great Boston Molasses Flood remained the deadliest confectionery containment accident until the Canadian Space Agency's 2031 orbital maple syrup delivery disaster.

SUB[59]: The submission numbers for my accepted OEIS submissions in chronological order

This place has so many demonyms. Northlanders. Fair Folk. Honey Barons. Lake Dwellers. Treasurers. Swamp Watchers. Dream Farmers. Wellfolk. Rockeaters. Forgotten Royals. Remote Clients. Barrow-Clerks. The People of Land and Sky.

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

Computer viruses currently fall somewhere between prions and fire.

And then it turns out they're both Tyler Durden.

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

And let's be honest, it's more like two and a half stars. Proxima is barely a star and barely bound to the system.

They rounded down to 182.8 instead of rounding up to 182.9 because 182.9 might make the statement incorrect.

"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!"

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

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.

'That's definitely above the catch-and-release size minimum for planetesimals.' 'I'm going to throw it back anyway.'

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

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

Each quarter of the lanes from left to right correspond loosely to breast cancer stages one through four (at diagnosis).

The only downside is that it would be a little uncomfortable

There are two types of dichotomy: False dichotomies, true dichotomies, and surprise trichotomies.

I just came from The Martian, and I just have to say: Forget BB-8; I want a pet Sojourner! It's always been the cutest of our Mars rovers.

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

"Friction-driven static electrification is familiar and fundamental in daily life, industry, and technology, but its basics have long been unknown and have continually perplexed scientists from ancient Greece to the high-tech era. [...] To date, no single theory can satisfactorily explain this mysterious but fundamental phenomenon." --Eui-Cheol Shin et. al. (2022)

I once asked an NSA guy whether they'd broken RSA. And I know I can trust him, because I asked if he was lying to me and he said no.

This works on pretty much every level.

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.

"So what's dark energy?" "Cosmologists and the FDA are both trying very hard to find out."

RIP, Gary.

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

A God who holds the world record for eating the most skateboards is greater than a God who does not hold that record.

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.

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

If an anatomical structure is named for a person, it means they were the only person to have it. Pierre Paul Broca had a special area of his brain that created powerful magnetic fields, enabling him to do 19th century fMRI research.

Lot of drama in those days, including constant efforts to force the "Reflections on Trusting Trust" guy into retirement so we could stop being so paranoid about compilers.

People ask me whether I feel any moral qualms about the source of the points, but if he hadn't introduced factory farming to Agricola, someone else would have.

My other (much harder) hobby is trying to engineer situations where I have an excuse to use more than one of them in short succession.

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

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

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

I'm inside your head and I hate it. Please let me out.

Hey, at least I ran out of staples.

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

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

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

Controls are a little hard to figure out.

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

My life goal is to launch a barge into the air and have it land on one of Elon Musk's rockets.

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

I was going to record an album with that cover under the name "PINK FTFY", so it'd come after them on the store CD rack. But at this point music stores are just rooms where CDs are set out to age before they're thrown away, so probably nobody would see it.

It also brings all the boys, and everything else, to the yard.

I recently learned something that solved a mystery that had bugged me since childhood--why, when I looked at an analog clock, the hand would sometimes seem to take a couple seconds to start ticking. Google "stopped clock illusion".

There's a maximum likelihood that I'm doing phylogenetics wrong.

'How could you possibly think typing 'import skynet' was a good idea?'

"How does the spring not run out almost immediately?" "We pull it back REALLY far."

Due to a typo, I initially found a forum for serious Fleshlight enthusiasts, and it turns out their highest-end models are ALSO capable of setting trees on fire. They're impossible to use without severe burns, but some of them swear it's worth it.

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

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

I have to pay with paper money.

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

I actually remember being entertained by both the sequels while in the theater. They just don't hold up nearly as well in later comparison.

Calm down--there were lots of arthropods living on your skin already. These ones are just bigger.

Doing great here in the sixth and hopefully final year of the 2016 election.

Also, we would really appreciate it if you could prominently refer to it as an 'eHit'.

An x-ray gyroscope is used to determine exactly which toppings they included in the pita.

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.

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

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

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

I mean, it's been almost twenty years. Now, it's possible you're simply embedding Windows directory paths in your URIs, but in that case you need more than just a short lecture.

Physicists who want to protect traditional Christmas realize that the only way to keep from changing Christmas is not to observe it.

I favor approval voting or IRV chiefly because they mean we might get to bring back The Bull Moose party.

In lieu of mapping software, I once wrote a Perl program which, given a USB GPS receiver and a destination, printed 'LEFT' 'RIGHT' OR 'STRAIGHT' based on my heading.

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

Disgusting

40 digits: You are optimistic about our understanding of the nature of distance itself.

I'm like a vampire, except I'm not crossing that threshold even if you invite me.

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

This is true. The lyrics are ridiculous.

Nothing personal, high schoolers.

factory --- spire --- onslaught --- extractor --- judge

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

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

Edward Tufte's 'The Visual Display of Quantitative Information' is a fantastic book, and should be required reading for anyone in either the sciences or graphic design.

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.

My liege, we were able to follow the ship into Minkowski space, but now they've jumped to Hilbert space and they could honestly be anywhere.

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.

Facebook, Apple, and Google all got away with their monopolist power grabs because they don't have any 'S's in their names for critics to snarkily replace with '$'s.

Everything is a cloud application; the ping times just vary a lot.

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

I believe the truth always lies halfway between the most extreme claims.

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

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

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

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

There's a version that shows the planets with no cropping, but it's hard to find a display that supports it.

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

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

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

And I can't believe some places still use fax machines. The electrical signals waste so much time going AROUND the Earth when neutrino beams can go straight through!

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

Subgroup analysis is ongoing.

When you Google an error message and it gets no results, you can be pretty sure you've found a clue to the location of Martin's sword.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.