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

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We've gotten him up to 20% milk and cookies through an aggressive public campaign, but that seems to be his dietary limit. Anything above that and he starts developing nutritional deficiencies.

Bad flu epidemics can hit young adults hardest because they provoke their powerful immune systems into overreaction, so to stay healthy spend the next few weeks drunk and sleep-deprived to keep yours suppressed.

We don't sell products; we sell the marketplace. And by 'sell the marketplace' we mean 'play shooters, sometimes for upwards of 20 hours straight.'

You can click to preorder to get a copy of What If? 2 when it comes out 9/13, assuming we all make it past the spider situation(?) on Tuesday(?).

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

The value of n is still unknown, but new results constrain it to fall between 8 and 10^500, ruling out popular 'n=1' and 'n=2' theories.

IMO the thymus is one of the coolest organs and we should really use it in metaphors more.

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.

Someday I'll be rich enough to hire Nate Silver to help make all my life decisions. 'Should I sleep with her?' 'Well, I'm showing a 35% chance it will end badly.'

Any time I misspell a word it's just because I have too much integrity to copy answers from the dictionary.

Data adapted from 'The Laurentide and Innuitian ice sheets during the Last Glacial Maximum' by A.S. Dyke et. al., which was way better than the sequels 'The Laurentide and Innuitian ice sheets during the Last Glacial Maximum: The Meltdown' and 'The Laurentide and Innuitian ice sheets during the Last Glacial Maximum: Continental Drift'.

For even more info, see blarbl(2)(3) and birb(3ahhaha I'm kidding, just Google it like a normal person.

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.

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

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

You can evade blue shells in Double Dash, but it is deep magic.

In the Hall of the Mountain King was accidentally composed on log/log paper.

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

Some people suspect that it started as a "No, I didn't forget Valentine's Day" excuse that got out of hand.

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

If long tooltips / cut off for you / then upgrade from / Firefox 2 / Burma Shave

If you don't get this one, don't google it.

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

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

And the baby has a fever.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sometimes, I sit on top of parking decks and watch the sun rise. I feel like I should have a guitar or something.

Sadly, this is a true story. At least I learned about the OS X 'say' command.

There's also the TV show based on the hit Hot and Cold Music books: Fun With Chairs, Royal Rumble, Knife Blizzard, Breakfast for Birds, and Samba Serpents.

We actually reached the future about three years ago.

This image stays roughly in sync with the day (assuming the Earth continues spinning). Shortcut: xkcd.com/now

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

Rümeysa Öztürk was grabbed off the street in my town one month ago.

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.

Awww.

"The police told me I can't be a doctor, but whenever they show up I just go into the Google Maps settings page I found and change the house to 'Police Headquarters' and then they have to do what I say."

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

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

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

2030: "I just bought a house for one bitcoin. No, it's the equivalent of a dollar. Houses are often transferred for a nominal fee because the buyer is taking responsibility for containing the holo-banshees in the attic."

Don't forget the time you spend finding the chart to look up what you save. And the time spent reading this reminder about the time spent. And the time trying to figure out if either of those actually make sense. Remember, every second counts toward your life total, including these right now.

A left-handed sheet bend creates a much weaker connection, especially under moderate loads.

Sometimes, you have to sacrifice pieces to gain the advantage. Sometimes, to advance ... you have to fall back.

Implausible, did you say? Sorry, couldn't quite hear you from all the way up heeeeeeeeere!

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

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

Aww, the oceanic crust and the continental crust are getting married!

I remember the exact moment in my childhood when I realized, while reading a flyer, that nobody would ever spend money solely to tell me they wanted to give me something for nothing. It's a much more vivid memory than the (related) parental Santa talk.

I really shouldn't abuse that power so heavily.

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

A tattoo of a tattoo parlor receipt

Did you know sociologists can't explain why people keep repeating that urban legend about bumblebees not being able to fly!?

I think about self-reference a lot. Example: this comment.

The projection for those who think the Mercator projection gives people a distorted idea of how big Greenland is, but a very accurate idea of how big it SHOULD be.

There are actually lowercase-like 'oldstyle' forms of normal numbers with more pronounced ascenders and descenders, which is why some numbers like '5' in books sometimes dangle below the line. But the true capital numbers remain the domain of number maven Mavis Beacon.

If you actually do this, what really happens is Douglas Hofstadter appears and talks to you for eight hours about strange loops.

They originally came here to try to investigate our chemtrail technology, and got increasingly frustrated when all their samples turned out to just be water ice with trace amounts of jet exhaust.

And even when they're not distracted, they usually get kicked out for illegal under-the-net 'subduction spikes'.

It looks good, but it needs more postfixins.

I just read a pop-science book by a respected author. One chapter, and much of the thesis, was based around wildly inaccurate data which traced back to ... Wikipedia. To encourage people to be on their toes, I'm not going to say what book or author.

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

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

The Atlantic is expanding at about 10 ppm (points per month).

I'm as surprised as you! I didn't think it was possible.

Not to be confused with 'making money selling this stuff to OTHER people who think it works', which corporate accountants and actuaries have zero problems with.

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

I also have an utterance. Less of an utterance and more of an incantation. Less of an incantation and more of a malediction. Less of a malediction and more of a Word of Power. Less of a Word of Power and more of an Unforgivable Curse.

My bracket was busted in the first round; I had Massachusetts v. Connecticut in the final, probably in a case over who gets to annex Rhode Island.

This projection distorts both area and direction, but preserves Melbourne.

In addition to eating foxes, rabbits can eat grass. The grass also eats foxes. Our equations chart the contours of Fox Hell.

So do you have any plans for z=-0.000000000000045?

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

I've been working on chocolate bar annealing techniques to try to produce the perfect laser s'more. Maybe don't mention that on the grant application though.

My favorite thing to do at parties is to talk judgmentally about people who aren't there.

Lots of people called their ships unsinkable before the Titanic. Voicing your hubris doesn't make failure more likely, just more memorable.

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.

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

Great, and you JUST finished paying off the settlement over the Wayne Coyne hamster ball incident.

WHEN I WAS ON A BOAT I DROPPED MY PHONE CAN U LOOK FOR IT

Officer suspended from horse.

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

Guess who has two thumbs and spent the night in an ER after trying to rescue a kitten that ran under his car at a stoplight and climbed up into the engine compartment? And, thanks to antibiotics, will continue having two thumbs? THIS GUY. (P.S. kitten is safe!)

That track ('Battle Without Honor or Humanity') -- like 'Ride of the Valkyries' -- improves *any* activity.

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.

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

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

A leading expert characterized the situation as 'retarded'

Now I'm tempted to start telling people that I secretly don't actually know how to do any physics calculations, and so all the answers in What If are based on me actually trying to do the thing and then reporting what happened, but phrased as if it's hypothetical.

You don't want the nitrogen percentage to be too high or you run the risk of eutrophication.

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

I'm actually not sure if Vader and the Emperor count as a household or if Vader lives in that weird black egg thing or what.

My all-time favorite example of syntactic ambiguity comes from Wikipedia: 'Charlotte's Web is a children's novel by American author E. B. White, about a pig named Wilbur who is saved from being slaughtered by an intelligent spider named Charlotte.'

As of this writing, Ubuntu 6.10 and Firefox 2.0 have left my computer a complete mess.

Another group of mathematicians is working to put an upper bound on the number, although everyone keeps begging them to stop.

Completely implausible? Yes. Nevertheless, worth keeping a can of shark repellent next to the bed.

When I say we should do something sometime, I'm secretly hoping you'll say 'Why not now?'

Want to feel old? Wait.

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 best place to be for a hug eclipse is a scenic natural area with good views and few clouds. The worst place to be is the lunar surface.

Most of our universe consists of dark matter rendered completely undetectable by our spacetime codec's dynamic range issues.

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

Even the identity matrix doesn't work normally

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

This is how I explain computer problems to my cat. My cat usually seems happier than me.

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

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

With just one extra line, he could have anticipated the 2003 film The Core, but some things are too audacious for even the greatest visionaries.

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

Some personal news: After treating my first case a few years ago with antibiotics, I can report that I have now had appendicitis for the second and--unless something extremely unexpected happened with the surgery--final time.

Can't and shouldn't.

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.

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

The one time I tried, I got hit by a slinky going down at double speed.

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

Calling a cab means cutting into beer money.

At one point, by force of childhood habit, the doctor accidentally removed three or four organs.

Opening dialogue by Scott

I mean, it's pretty, but it doesn't really affect us beyond that. Except that half the nights aren't really dark, and once or twice a day it makes the oceans flood the coasts.

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.

"I have nothing to offer but blood--next slide, please--toil--next slide, please--tears, and--next slide, please--sweat."

I can't believe they wouldn't even let me hold a vote among the passengers about whether to try the loop.

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

And they choose Al Gore as Internet Secretary.

[after a minute] "Okay, I think I've got it, thanks. Can I--" "oOOOooOOooo!"

#pugglewumper Tashari got me some ink pens! I've been experimenting with them.

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.

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

The state has had so many contact tracers disappear into that shop that they've had to start a contact tracer tracing program.

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

Tomorrow's sessions will be entirely devoted to sewing machine rotary hooks.

We haven't actually seen a star fall in since we invented telescopes, but I have a list of ones I'm really hoping are next.

ARCTANGENT THETA = ENCHANT AT TARGET

I guess it's a saying from the Old Country.

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

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

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

I spent a long time thinking about how to design a system for long-term organization and storage of subject-specific informational resources without needing ongoing work from the experts who created them, only to realized I'd just reinvented libraries.

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.

The film is set in 2018, but when Commander Bremberly chases the hologram through Times Square, there's a billboard for Avengers: Age of Ultron. Depending on the date, that billboard would have been advertising either Infinity War or this movie.

How many points do you get for dunking every basketball in existence at once?

Buildings constructed from softer materials were damaged by chili pepper impacts to the storm's high Richter-Fujita-Scoville-Mohs hardness rating.

We all remember those famous first words spoken by an astronaut on the surface of Mars: "That's one small step fo- HOLY SHIT LOOK OUT IT'S GOT SOME KIND OF DRILL! Get back to the ... [unintelligible] ... [signal lost]"

"But there are seven billion people in the world! I can't possibly stop to consider how ALL of them might interpret something!" "Ah, yes, there's no middle ground between 'taking personal responsibility for the thoughts and feelings of every single person on Earth' and 'covering your eyes and ears and yelling logically correct statements into the void.' That's a very insightful point and not at all inane."

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

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

This is actually pencil on paper, just inverted and colored

No, YOU stumble past a series of post-breakup hookups in a daze as you slowly realize what you've lost and how unlikely you are ever to get it back first.

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

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

I'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.

Our retina display features hundreds of pixels per inch in the central fovea region.

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

If that's too easy, you could try joining Tautology Club, which meets on the date of the Tautology Club meeting.

The failures usually don't hurt anything, and if it installs several versions, it increases the chance that one of them is right. (Note: The 'yes' command and '2>/dev/null' are recommended additions.)

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

...wait until they type in payment information, then use it to order yourself a replacement phone.

Although maybe it's just a phase, like freshman year of college when I realized I could just buy frosting in a can.

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

There are a lot of books on marketing out there. I wonder if you're safest just buying the most popular one.

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].'

Took me five tries to find the right one, but I managed to salvage our night out--if not the boat--in the end.

I hear that there are actual lyrics later on in Land of 1,000 Dances, but other than the occasional 'I said,' I've never listened long enough to hear any of them.

[After setting your car on fire] Listen, your car's temperature has changed before.

They are six-legged spiders

Two tips: 1) 8675309 is not just prime, it's a twin prime, and 2) if you ever find yourself raising log(anything)^e or taking the pi-th root of anything, set down the marker and back away from the whiteboard; something has gone horribly wrong.

People into masturbatory navel-gazing have a lot to learn about masturbation.

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

[Future update] Well, someone accidentally dropped an M&M in their cup of ice water, and we all panicked and scattered.

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

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

If she'd lived in Flagstaff (elevation 6,903 feet), Cruella de Vil would only have needed 89 dalmatians for her coat.

I'm leaning toward fifteen. There are a lot of them.

Hard to believe that for so many years once they were fully extended we just let them tip over.

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

I call Rule 34 on Wolfram's Rule 34.

[One hill over, a competing astrophotographer does a backflip over a commercial airliner while throwing a tray of plastic space stations into the air, through which a falcon swoops to 'grab' the real one.]

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

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

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!

I was going to be a scientist, but that seems silly now. Magical worlds exist. I've learned a huge truth about our place in the universe. I'm supposed to care about college? I mean, FUCK.

SomethingAwful has a wonderful compilation of crazy AOL searches in their Weekend Web archives, 2006-08-13.

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

Their biggest mistake was bringing Rachael Ray and Emeril to tour the lab and sign off on the project. That's when Spielberg caught wind of it.

Mars does get a good score on 'noise levels' and 'scenic views,' but the school district ranking isn't great; the only teacher--the Perseverance rover--is too busy with rock samples to teach more than the occasional weekend class.

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

This car has 240% of a horse's decision-making ability and produces only 30% as much poop.

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

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

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

On the plus side, we definitely killed that cancer over there, even if we caused a bunch more everywhere else.

People looking for the gaps in our understanding where the meaning of consciousness or free will might hide often turn to quantum uncertainty or infinite cosmologies, as if we don't have breathtakingly complex emergent phenomena right there in our freezers.

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

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

If you had an oven bag and a dryer that runs unusually hot, I guess you could in theory make tumbled eggs.

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

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

Surely (no one/everyone) will (recognize how flexible and useful this architecture is/spend a huge amount of effort painstakingly preserving and updating this garbage I wrote in 20 minutes)

I dropped a bird and I didn't hear it hit bottom.

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

He also broke the streak that incumbents with websites are unbeatable and Delawareans can't win, creating a new precedent: Only someone from Delaware can defeat an incumbent with a website.

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

My favorite might be U+1F609 U+1F93F WINKING FACE VOMITING.

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

A laptop battery contains roughly the stored energy of a hand grenade, and if shorted it ... hey! You can't arrest me if I prove your rules inconsistent!

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

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

The Earth is, on average, located in the habitable zone, but at any given time it has a certain probability of being outside it, which is why life exists on Earth but is mortal.

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

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 ...

The Norwegian adaptation of The Sword in the Stone takes things in a weird direction.

There's a mountain lion nearby, but it didn't notice you because it's reading Facebook.

Certain hybrid events can only happen in certain locations where all the conditions are present; chasers flock to the area in and around Kansas known as tumbleweed-colliding-with-possum alley.

In the 90s, our variety radio station used the tagline "the best music of the 70s, 80s, and 90s." After 2000, they switched to "the best music of the 80s, 90s, and today." I figured they'd change again in 2010, but it's 2017 and they're still saying "80s, 90s, and today." I hope radio survives long enough for us to find out how they deal with the 2020s.

'So how DID you go from working at the employment records office to becoming president of MIT and CEO of IBM?' 'I guess I just have an eye for opportunities.'

I ended up getting my tax return prepared at a local place by a really friendly pretrained neural net named Greg.

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

Hey, why stop at our house? We could burn down ALL these houses for the insurance money.

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?'

The theory finally unifies cosmic inflation and regular inflation.

I won't eat invertebrates, because I can fight a skeleton, but I have no idea what kind of spooky warrior a squid leaves behind.

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

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

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.'

Medium: Pencil on paper

The projection does a good job preserving both distance and azimuth, at the cost of really exaggerating how many South Americas there are.

It's a myth that the Great Wall of China is the only human-made structure visible from space--there are LOTS of structures for us to feel self-conscious about!

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

And I was kicked out of my March Madness pool because I wouldn't shut up about the evidence for NBA/ABA endosymbiosis.

Never bring tequila to a key-signing party.

Programming the sexbots to enjoy sex seemed a sensible move at the time, but we didn't realize the consequences of their developing fetishes.

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

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

I'm not a lawyer, but I believe zones like this are technically considered the high seas, so if you cut a pizza into a spiral there you could be charged with pieracy under marinaritime law.

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

She's so fat the attraction goes up as the CUBE of the distance instead of the square

And what about all the people who won't be able to join the community because they're terrible at making helpful and constructive co-- ... oh.

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

It's probably just me. If driving were as dangerous as it seems, hundreds of people would be dying every day!

Borat came out twenty years ago this year--closer to the breakup of the Soviet Union than to today--but it honestly feels like it's been even longer, somehow.

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

If you want to have more fun at the expense of language pedants, try developing an hypercorrection habit.

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.

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

It's a myth that you can never cross mountains safely, but be sure you understand how the climatic situation there will affect your parent thunderstorm.

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

The average error in the NHC forecasted position of a hurricane three days in the future has shrunk to a third of what it was in 1990--a staggering accomplishment. However, as you may have gathered, forecasts of future storm *strength* have proved more difficult to improve.

(c) You can have a scooter when you pay for it yourself, and (d) if you can't learn to start a new thread rather than responding to an old one, you'll be banned. [thread locked by moderator]

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.

Wow, that's less than $200 per ... uh ... that's a good deal!

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

'Nuh-uh! We let users vote on comments and display them by number of votes. Everyone knows that makes it impossible for a few persistent voices to dominate the discussion.'

I was eventually kicked out of my architectural engineering program because I wouldn't stop referring to HVAC as "the fandom."

If you find and stop the video, but you've--against all odds--gotten curious about the trade summit, just leave the tab opened. It will mysteriously start playing again 30 minutes later!

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.

There are probably children out there holding down spacebar to stay warm in the winter! YOUR UPDATE MURDERS CHILDREN.

There used to be these ads, see . . .

Merry Christmas from xkcd!

Hurricane forums are full of excited comments about central pressure and wind speed and comparisons to Camille and 1931 and 1938, with hastily-tacked-on notes about how it will be tragic if anyone dies and they hope it's a dud.

This project actually inspired a two-hour powerpoint presentation that Al Gore gave around the country.

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!

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.

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.'

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.

'Welcome to the future! Nothing's changed.' was the slogan of my astonishingly short-lived tech startup.

I hate how many times you have to press it to get to the system normal people use, degrees Rømer.

Happy little turtles

If you're annoying enough, you can get them to respond with an involuntary second sigh and get a rhythm going.

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.

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

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.

I take the view that "open-faced sandwiches" are not sandwiches, but all other physical objects are.

2048: "Great news for Maine—we're once again an independent state!!! Thanks, @unicode, for ruling in our favor and sending troops to end New Hampshire's annexation. 🙏🚁🎖️"

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

Does the screeching chill your blood and herald death? If yes, banshee. If no, seagull.

Great, LO-M. Do you speak Bocce? I'm supposed to find one that speaks Bocce.

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

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.

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

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

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

The distinctive 'UCLA comma' and 'Michigan comma' are a long string of commas at the start and end of the sentence respectively.

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

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

As my standard, I use going to sleep at midnight and waking up at 8 AM.

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

For the moment it's a standoff

I'm trying to buy a gravitational lens for my camera, but I can't tell if the manufacturers are listing comoving focal length or proper focal length.

I guess I need to apologize to my parents, friends, and the staff at Chuck E. Cheese's for all the times I called the cops on them.

’"‘”’" means "I edited this text on both my phone and my laptop before sending it"

The discovery of a fully typographical star system comes with a big asterisk.

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

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

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

Trivia: Roger Daltry originally wrote 'Don't try an' Digg what we all say' but erased the second 'g' when he moved to reddit.

I'm going to drive this Netherlands joke so far into the ground they'll have to build levees around it to keep the sea out.

The way out is to use the marker you have to add a box that says 'get a marker' to the line between you and 'start', then add a 'no' line from the trap box to 'end'.

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

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

BREAKING: Senator's bold pro-podium stand leads to primary challenge from prescriptivist base.

My icebox plum trap easily captured William Carlos Williams. It took much less work than the infinite looping network of diverging paths I had to build in that yellow wood to ensnare Robert Frost.

Anyone who says that they're great at communicating but 'people are bad at listening' is confused about how communication works.

If there's no dome, how do you explain the irregularities the board discovered in the zoning permits issued in that area!?

It can be expensive to hire a professional spectroscopist for your wedding, but the quality of the spectra you get is worth it.

I tried converting the prices into pizzas, to put it in more familiar terms, and it just became a hard-to-think-about number of pizzas.

Out in a field, not another car for miles, silence but for the rain drumming on the sunroof, warm thick folds of the blanket hiding wordless fingertip games ...

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

"All the companies whose blimps I shot fireworks at are mad, but MetLife is especially miffed because I dressed up as the Red Baron."

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

58% of the state has gone into plaid.

'Hey, can you call my cell?' '...I'm trying, but it says this number is blocked?' 'Ok, thanks, just checking.'

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

If you must know, I'm currently researching how to save this emailed tax form as a regular PDF so I can print and sign it. Our work isn't a lock for the Nobel, but we're in the running.

Of course in reality this is just a US/UK thing; in British English, 'fall' is the brief period in between and 'autumn' is the main season.

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

Premature optimization is the root of all evil, so to start this project I'd better come up with a system that can determine whether a possible optimization is premature or not.

[*disables social networking accounts*] [*social isolation increases*] Wait, why does this ALSO feel bad?

I used to do this all the time.

'The light from those millions of stars you see is probably many thousands of years old' is a rare example of laypeople substantially OVERestimating astronomical numbers.

Better change the URL to 'https' before downloading.

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

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.

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

I was really impressed by the accuracy of some of the report's predictions about fossil fuel consumption. Then I realized, oh, right, of course.

An hour later: SUGGESTION: LICK HER NIPPLE MORE.

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

The best hugs are probably from hagfish, which can extrude microscopic filaments that convert a huge volume of water around them to slime in seconds. Instant cozy blanket!

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

'Which one?' 'I dunno, it's your house. Just check each object.' 'Check it for *what*?' 'Whether it looks like it might have touched a paper towel at some point and then forgotten to let go.' '...' 'You can also Google to learn how to check which things are using which resources.' 'You know, I'll just leave the towel there and try again tomorrow.'

They said after I got into a routine, I'd enjoy getting progressively stronger and stop whining so much about how hard exercise was. Well, they were half right!

Not shown: the approximately 30,000 identical, vaguely hysterical articles titled "WHITE PEOPLE IN [THE US/BRITAIN] TO BECOME MINORITY BY [YEAR]!", which came up for basically any year I put in.

I have nothing to apologize for.

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.

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

My Deep Impact/Little Prince crossover fanfic has been poorly received by the community.

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

Our company can be your one-stop shop for decentralization.

Their crash investigation team had some particularly harsh words for Dave Matthews.

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

Star Trek V is a small part of the space frontier, but it's been a while since that movie came out so I assume we've finished exploring it by now.

That's nothing. I once lost my genetics, rocketry, and stripping licenses in a single incident.

I'm looking forward to having to worry a lot less about covid, but wouldn't mind if we worried a little more about giving each other colds. Colds are bad!

You can do this one in every 30 times and still have 97% positive feedback.

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

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

Theranos partnership: Sorry, we know, but we signed the contract back before all the stuff and the lawyers say we can't back out, so just try to keep your finger away from the bottom of the phone.

Well, for some value of 'actually work'.

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.

Turning in other directions can be accomplished by using a magnetized centerboard and ocean currents, since a current flowing through a magnetic field induces a Laplace force.

During the week, I research my character by living in his house and raising his children.

Points to anyone who hacks the Flickr devs' computers to make their text editors do this when you click on anything.

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

"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."

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

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

There's some flexibility depending on your standards for measuring runtime and the various special editions. If you still want to have a party, I'm sure you can find some combination that works.

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

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

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.

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

Favorite mastectomy breast prosthesis idea: a fake boob containing a spare rechargable battery, accessed via a nipple USB port. Complete with a ring of LED charge indicators in the areola!

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!

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

People say setting of fireworks indoors is dangerous, but I looked at their energy release and it's like 10^-40 foe; totally negligible.

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.

My parents sent me to several years of intensive Kix test prep.

This digital music thing will probably reach its endgame sometime in the next decade or so. These are very exciting times.

Mmmm, this is such a positive experience! I feel no social pressure to enjoy it at all!

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

The most rare, top-tier eclipse photo would be the Solar Earth Eclipse, but the Apollo 12 crew's attempt to capture it was marred by camera shake. They said it looked spectacular, though.

Cats can be smaller than the critical limit, but they're unobservable. If one shrinks enough that it crosses the limit, it just appears to get cuter and cuter as it slowly fades from view.

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

Things Leonhard Euler created ( most of math ( overlapping circle diagrams ) a cricket bowling machine ) Things John Venn created

Sometimes the best fun looks like boredom.

Your manuscript "Don't Pay $25 to Access Any of the Articles in this Journal: A Review of Preprint Repositories and Author Willingness to Email PDF Copies for Free" has also been rejected, but nice try.

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

I just can't wait for the Better Homes and Gardens list of helpful tips for household reuse of sixteen-inch acrylonitrile-butadiene-styrene phalluses.

'Whoa, twenty-two in two hours!' 'Your site got twenty-two hundred hits in two hours?' 'No. Twenty-two. But still, that's like half the people on the internet!'

Bald-faced hornets are only a 2 on the Schmidt pain index, so I shouldn't complain. The tennis ball ejected from the dryer exhaust vent could have ricocheted off the nest of a much higher-scoring insect before knocking me off the ladder. Really, I'm lucky.

They often use ball lenses to collect light at the ends of optical fibers, so when you look stuff up on the internet you're actually scrying through a crystal ball.

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

My brother had a ferret he loved which died since I drew this strip. RIP.

They're also refusing to fund my device that demonstrates uncontrolled hot fusion.

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

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

I feel bad for Earth 2 and their shadowflies.

Every Roomba needs a dueling harness.

I just Googled 'roomba sojourner mod' and was sorely disappointed. Be the change, I guess!

I've got the Craigslist post ready to go! I wasn't sure what category it should go in, so I listed it as property and put that it has 'good sun exposure.'

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

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

People often say that same-sex marriage now is like interracial marriage in the 60s. But in terms of public opinion, same-sex marriage now is like interracial marriage in the 90s, when it had already been legal nationwide for 30 years.

"What? I can't hear--" "What? I said, are you sure--" "CAN YOU PLEASE SPEAK--"