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

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That seems like an awful lot of hassle when all I wanted was a cool sword.

PROTIP: You can get around the Shannon-Hartley limit by setting your font size to 0.

Maybe we should give up on the whole idea of a 'back' button. 'Show me that thing I was looking at a moment ago' might just be too complicated an idea for the modern web.

autoexec code posted by verified twitter users

Knuth Paper-Stack Notation: Write down the number on pages. Stack them. If the stack is too tall to fit in the room, write down the number of pages it would take to write down the number. THAT number won't fit in the room? Repeat. When a stack fits, write the number of iterations on a card. Pin it to the stack.

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.

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

Unless the next line is, "After we broke up, she blamed the painting and spent years planning her revenge, so my sorrow is mixed with relief that the dogs at least denied her that triumph."

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

There's a river flowing through the ocean

In this situation, gzip /dev/inside to deflate, then pipe the compressed air to /dev/input to clean your keyboard. Avert your eyes when you do.

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.

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

"You don't know how high above you the sky goes, but you're not freaking out about that." "Well, NOW I am!"

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

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

For someone who has ostensibly outgrown staying up late waiting for Santa, I do spend an awful lot of time refreshing websites to see if packages are here yet.

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

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 dropped my phone while trying to search, and I tried to unlock it from up here, so can you also search for screen repair places?

You've got questions, we've got assumptions.

I'm currently in the I Have Cheese phase of this cycle.

Briefly set a new record for tallest human-made structure by getting my knit sweater snagged on the skydiving plane door as I jumped and not noticing until I'd landed.

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

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

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

Both arXiv and archive.org are invaluable projects which, if they didn't exist, we would dismiss as obviously ridiculous and unworkable.

No, wait, come back! I want to be friends at you!

Cloud computing has a ways to go.

This happens in geek circles every so often. The 'Hey, this is just a system I can figure out easily!' is also a problem among engineers first diving into the stock market.

Then I'll start work on my lunar engines to line the Moon up with the ecliptic so we can have a solar eclipse every month (with a little wobble so they're not always on the equator.)

The wolves thin the RAID arrays, removing the slowest and weakest disks to keep the average seek speed high.

New zero-day vulnerability: In addition to rowhammer, it turns out lots of servers are vulnerable to regular hammers, too.

I wonder if I still have time to go shoot a short film with Kevin Bacon.

'At least humans are better at quietly amusing ourselves, oblivious to our pending obsolescence' thought the human, as a nearby Dell Inspiron contentedly displayed the same bouncing geometric shape screensaver it had been running for years.

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

[20 minutes later] ", hi."

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

It's turtles all the way down.

Ahem. We are STRICTLY an Orbiter shop.

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

Ever notice how there aren't as many thunderstorms now as there were when you were a kid? Much like 'the shuffle on my MP3 player has a bias', this is occasionally true but universally believed. Brains are so interesting!

A solid red area with two white lines means that you have been infected with the anti-coronavirus, COVID+19, which will cure anyone you have close contact with.

Staple guns: because duct tape can't make that 'kaCHUNK' noise.

Although it was a setback for physics, I'm glad the particle naming rights issue led to the cancelation of Pizza Hut's Superconducting Super Collider in the early 90s, so the Double Stuffed Extra Cheese Topping Quark ended up just being named 'top quark.'

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

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.

Some surfaces may seem difficult to glue. But if you research the materials, find tables of what adhesives work on them, and prepare your surfaces carefully, you can fail to glue them in a fun NEW way that fills your house with dangerous vapors.

My normal approach is useless here, too.

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

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

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

But surely I owe you an accurate answer!

The distinction between a ship and a boat is a line drawn in water.

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

"Ugh, TMI." "Yeah, that's some tantalizing meat info."

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.

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

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

Our nucleic acid recovery techinques found a great deal of homo sapiens DNA incorporated into the fossils, particularly the ones containing high levels of resin, leading to the theory that these dinosaurs preyed on the once-dominant primates.

I had a hard time with Ayn Rand because I found myself enthusiastically agreeing with the first 90% of every sentence, but getting lost at 'therefore, be a huge asshole to everyone.'

There's quark color, but that's not really color--it's just an admission by 20th century physicists that numbers are boring.

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

Due to a minor glitch, 'discharge patient' does not cause the algorithm to exit, but instead leads back to 'hunt down and capture patient'.

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

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

Although now people will realize three-per-em space that all this time I've been using weird medium mathematical space whitespace characters in my hair space hair space hair space speech dot dot dot...

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

The Hubble length is about 1.9 meters lying down; Edwin Hubble was a tall guy.

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

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

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

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

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

A whirlpool!

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.

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

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

Remember to only adopt domesticated drones that specifically request it. It's illegal to collect wild ones under the Migratory Drone Treaty Act.

My pet theory is that in real life, the kid at the beginning of Jurassic Park who made fun of the 'six-foot turkey' never got a talking-to from Dr. Grant, and grew up to produce several of the movie's sequels.

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

It was finally destroyed with a nuclear weapon carrying the destructive energy of the Hiroshima bomb.

The prereqs for CPSC 357, the class on package management, are CPSC 432, CPSC 357, and glibc2.5 or later.

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.

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

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

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

Astronomy (or "astrology" in British English) is the study of ...

I guess the engineers who built my dishwasher MIGHT have some insight into how to load it, but instead of reading the booklet they gave me, it seems easier to experiment for years and then get in arguments so heated that I get banned from Quora.

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

The robot is pregnant. It isn't mine.

I'll take mine on the rocks, no ice.

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.

'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 ...'

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

Oh, wait, I might've had it set to kph instead of mph. But that would make the discrepancy even wider!

Our new video ad campaign has our product's name shouted in the first 500 milliseconds, so we can reach the people in adjacent rooms while the viewer is still turning down the volume.

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

They might make it past that first line of defense. For the second, you'll need some picture frames, a level, and a protractor that can do increments of less than a degree.

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

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.

The warning diamond on the Materials Safety Data Sheet for this stuff just has the "😰" emoji in all four fields.

I'm SO glad I escaped. They almost had me caught in their weird ... thing.

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

Oh, yeah, we get tons of them at these casual sex bars.

<A>: Like </a>this.

Subgroup analysis is ongoing.

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

Then I'm going to go on a weeks-long somatic hypermutation bender, producing ever-more targeted antibodies, while I continue to remain distanced and follow guidance from public health authorities.

The most ridiculous offender of all is the sudoers man page, which for 15 years has started with a 'quick guide' to EBNF, a system for defining the grammar of a language. 'Don't despair', it says, 'the definitions below are annotated.'

On one hand, every single one of my ancestors going back billions of years has managed to figure it out. On the other hand, that's the mother of all sampling biases.

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

Due to their proximity across the channel, there's long been tension between North Korea and the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Southern Ireland.

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

Disappointed that they caved to fan pressure and went with Ruth Bader Ginsburg over Elena Kagan.

I've been sneaking out at night and installing lamps on the underside of every photovoltaic panel I can find. Sure, there are upwards of 80% losses, but I prefer to think of them as nearly 20% gains.

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

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

I'm always disappointed when 'Anamorphic Widescreen' doesn't refer to a widescreen Animorphs movie.

Blade Runner: Classic, but incredibly slow.

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

Opening dialogue by Scott

Is he ALSO wondering at what point our thoughts diverged, if they even have yet? 'dude, I think he just took your credit card' AM I THE ORIGINAL? HOW DO I TELL?

The weak twin primes conjecture states that there are infinitely many pairs of primes. The strong twin primes conjecture states that every prime p has a twin prime (p+2), although (p+2) may not look prime at first. The tautological prime conjecture states that the tautological prime conjecture is true.

It works because a nautical mile is based on a degree of latitude, and the Earth (e) is a circle.

'Hey Megan, it's your father. How do I print out a flowchart?'

In retrospect, it's weird that as a kid I thought completely random outbursts made me seem interesting, given that from an information theory point of view, lexical white noise is just about the opposite of interesting by definition.

There are plenty of finer gradations. I got 'critically endangered/extinct in the wild' on my exam, although the curve bumped it all the way up to 'venti.'

There were actually some good reasons for those laws, but IMO they now do more harm than good. Which raises a question: If there's a ballot measure to strike them down, how can I resist the urge to take a picture of my "yes" vote?

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.'

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

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

If you're a geologist or geophysicist and you don't introduce yourself by saying your name, then gesturing downward and saying "... and I study that", I don't know what you're doing with your life.

And to you, I leave my life-sized ice sculpture replica of the Pietà which was blessed by the Pope. You must never let it melt! Now, remember, all gifts must be removed from my estate within 24 hours.

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

Never bring tequila to a key-signing party.

It struggles a little with complex positions, like when there are an even number of moves and it has to round down, but when run against itself it's capable of finding some novelties. At one point I saw six knights on the board at once; Stockfish rarely exceeds four.

The 8th panel is my favorite

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

All in all, I give this year a C-. There were no aurora visible from my house and that comet evaporated. They'd better not cancel the 2017 eclipse.

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!

One of these days me and Joey Comeau will get around to subverting the hetero-normative paradigm and fixing all this.

'So we just have a steady flow of metal piling up in our server room? Isn't that a problem?' 'Yeah, you should bring that up at our next bismuth meeting.'

If we get the doors open and plug up the dam on the Sirannon so the water rises a little, the pool will start draining into Moria. How do you think the Watcher would fare against a drenched Balrog?

Correlation doesn't imply causation, but it does waggle its eyebrows suggestively and gesture furtively while mouthing 'look over there'.

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.

I have never been as self-conscious about my handwriting as when I was inking in the caption for this comic.

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

I'd like to find a corpus of writing from children in a non-self-selected sample (e.g. handwritten letters to the president from everyone in the same teacher's 7th grade class every year)--and score the kids today versus the kids 20 years ago on various objective measures of writing quality. I've heard the idea that exposure to all this amateur peer practice is hurting us, but I'd bet on the generation that conducts the bulk of their social lives via the written word over the generation that occasionally wrote book reports and letters to grandma once a year, any day.

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.

The contents of any one panel are dependent on the contents of every panel including itself. The graph of panel dependencies is complete and bidirectional, and each node has a loop. The mouseover text has two hundred and forty-two characters.

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

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

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

This doesn't take into account the energy imparted by orbital motion (or gravity assists or the Oberth effect), all of which can make it easier to reach outer planets.

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

Some organization has been paying to keep this up and it hasn't been removed from search results. Seems like two votes of confidence to me.

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

'Here, I'll put my number in your cell pho -- wait, why is it already here?'

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

It's hard to train deep learning algorithms when most of the positive feedback they get is sarcastic.

Ever notice how the more successful observational comics become, the more their jokes focus on flying and hotels?

FYI: I'll be releasing a wolf into a randomly-chosen front yard sometime in the next 30 years. Now your fear is reasonable, and you don't need to feel embarrassed anymore. Problem solved!

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

WAKE up in the MORning and my BREATH ain't PREtty / and noBODY'S gonna KISS me if my MOUTH smells SHItty / so I ALways brush my TEETH before I START on the JACK / sure, my DRINKing's out of HAND, but I'm conTROLLing my PLAQUE.

I call Rule 34 on Wolfram's Rule 34.

I'm working on assembling a combination declinometer, sclerometer, viscometer, aleurometer, stalagmometer, and hypsometer. I'm making good progress according to my ometerometer, a device which shows the rate at which I'm acquiring measurement devices.

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!

'The Return of the Boomerang' would make a great movie title.

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.'

You have to be careful doing this. Sometimes, when you push the whisker down, dynamite explodes.

Achilles was a mighty warrior, but his Achilles' heel was his heel.

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.

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!)

This year, our team took home the dark blue ribbon, better than the midnight blue we got last year but still short of the winning navy blue.

On the news a few days later: "Buzz is building around the so-called 'camping Roomba' after a big investment. Preorders have spiked, and..."

Since the current Twitter threadfall kicked off in early 2016, we can expect it to continue until the mid 2060s when the next Interval begins.

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!

Just thought you should know

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

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

They actually started the reversed-text practice in 1977 -- not for ease-of-reading reasons, but because too many people were driving backward down the highway blasting the Star Wars opening theme.

I have to pay with paper money.

INSIDE ELON MUSK'S NEW ATOMIC CAT

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

'This space intentionally left blank' is less immediately provocative but more Hofstadterially confusing.

Inigo/Buttercup 4eva <3

Evolutionarily speaking, mushrooms are technically a type of ghost.

It's bad enough that all the families in your Sims are just you and Maggie recreated over and over.

It me, your father.

I love the title-text!

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.

Benthic Santas weren't even discovered until the 1970s, but many scientists now believe Christmas may have originally developed around hydrothermal vents and only later migrated to the surface.

Concealed mostly beneath the surface, sharks are the icebergs of the sea.

I felt so clever when I found a way to game the Fitocracy system by incorporating a set of easy but high-scoring activities into my regular schedule. Took me a bit to realize I'd been tricked into setting up a daily exercise routine.

It's taken me 20 years to get over skyline tetris.

I can't get over the suspicion that all those viral pictures are photoshopped and 'Flemish' belongs in the lower right circle.

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

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

It was bound to happen eventually. This data theft will enable almost limitless [xkcd.com/792]-style password reuse attacks in the coming weeks. There's only one group that comes out of this looking smart: Everyone who pirated Photoshop.

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

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

And she put sweet nothings in all my .conf files. It'll take me forever to get X working again.

Why did we even have that thing?

'Oh, hey Mom. No, nothing important, just at work.'

'Come to what?' 'You. Me. This moment.'

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

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

High-speed collisions at the Baby Park track may support the hypothesis that Daisy is her own evil twin, a theory first suggested by Nintendo in the game Majorana's Mask.

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

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

Subway refuses to answer my questions about whether it's an International Footlong or a US Survey Footlong. A milligram of sandwich is at stake!

Lifehacking!

Of course, I sort all my bookshelves the normal way, alphabetically (by first sentence).

AAAAAA A ÃA̧AȂA̦ ǍÅÂÃĀÁȂ AAAAAAA!

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

'Am I taking care of you? I have a thesis to write!' 'My parents are at their house; you visited last--' 'No, no, explain like you're five.'

[Dog returns with the end of a string in its mouth] [Voice drifts down from the sky] Kites are fun!

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

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

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

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

In the future, every single pipeline will lead to the bowl of a giant blender, and we'll all just show up with a bucket each day to take our share of the resulting smoothie.

Grayton also proposed making college scholarships available exclusively to sexually active teens, amnesty for illegal immigrants who create room for themselves by killing a citizen, and a graduated income tax based on penis size. He has been endorsed by Tracy Morgan, John Wilkes Booth's ghost, and the Time Cube guy.

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

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

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

A hydroelectric dam is also known as a heavy water reactor.

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

'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 believe in getting immunity the old-fashioned way: By letting a bat virus take control of my lungs and turn my face into a disgusting plague fountain while my immune system desperately Googles 'how to make spike protein antibodies'.

Kenneth Arrow hated me because the ordering of my preferences changes based on which voting systems have what level of support. But it tells me a lot about the people I'm going to be voting with!

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

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

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.

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

As always, you are permitted to call one person for guidance, but that person must be a grandparent.

'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.

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

I just spent 20 minutes deciding whether to start an email with 'Hi' or 'Hey', so I think it transferred correctly.

If it's over water, and you can't get a boat or revise the rules to preserve the makeout, there is no helping you.

zo'o ta jitfa .i .e'o xu do pendo mi

This one is a little bland. Pass the saltshaker?

Proof of Zermelo's well-ordering theorem given the Axiom of Choice: 1: Take S to be any set. 2: When I reach step three, if S hasn't managed to find a well-ordering relation for itself, I'll feed it into this wood chipper. 3: Hey, look, S is well-ordered.

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.

Hard to imagine political rhetoric more microtargeted at me than 'I love Venn diagrams. I really do, I love Venn diagrams. It's just something about those three circles.'

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

This was an actual mock conversation between me and a friend at TGiF. The waitress walked up around panel 5 and was somewhat put off.

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

I've developed a more logical set of rules but the people on the chess community have a bunch of stupid emotional biases and won't reply to my posts.

President Andrew Johnson once said, "If I am to be shot at, I want Gnome Ann to be in the way of the bullet."

"Symbolic integration" is when you theatrically go through the motions of finding integrals, but the actual result you get doesn't matter because it's purely symbolic.

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.

I admit this is an exaggeration, since I can think of at least three parties I attended while doing my degree, and I'm probably forgetting several more.

This restaurant is great! I was feeling really sick, but then I ate there and felt better!

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

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.

Twister would've been a much better movie if they'd cut out the bad-guy storm chaser and all the emotional romance crap. All you need for a good movie are tornados and scientists. Actually, that's all you need for anything.

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.

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

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

The only blood these contracts are signed in is from me cutting my hand trying to open the goddamn CD case.

Even when you try to make nice, smooth ice cubes in a freezer, sometimes one of them will shoot out a random ice spike, which physicists ascribe to kiki conservation.

Every year I make out my bracket at the season, and every year it's busted before the first game when I find out which teams are playing.

'I'm nothing without you' is a fucked-up sentiment.

It's a good mountain but it really peaked in the 80s.

If you're going to let it burn up, make sure it happens over the deep end of the bathtub and not any populated parts of the house!

I think I see a Mandelbrot set! No, that's just blood splatters. Golly.

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

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

If that fails, just multiply every number by a thousand. 'The 2nd St speed limit should be set at 25,000 mph, which would likely have prevented 1,000 of the intersection's 3,000 serious accidents last month.'

They tried to report me to the authorities, but because I had the device they couldn't charge me.

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

It's really hard to control the frequency, actually.

[They do not move.]

If I were trapped on a desert island, and could have an unlimited supply of any one type of apple, I'd be like, "How did this situation happen?"

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

Resulting in The Little Rock 9x + C.

The most awkward part is when you have to pause to put on your shoes before you continue rolling out the door.

Oh, weird, Amazon is out of butterfly nets.

I can't speak to the paper's scientific merits, but it's really cool how on page 10 you can see that their reference GPS beacon is sensitive enough to pick up continential drift under the detector (interrupted halfway through by an earthquake).

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

Whoa, and if you overlay a Fibonacci spiral on a golden spiral it matches up almost perfectly!

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've noticed you physics people can be a little on the reductionist side." "That's ridiculous. Name ONE reductionist word I've ever said."

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

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

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.

They have a telescope pointed RIGHT AT US!

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

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

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.

Sitting here idly trying to figure out how the population of the Old West in the late 1800s compares to the number of Red Dead Redemption 2 players.

I always wanted to impress them with how well I could hear, didn't you? Also, this sets the record for number of awkward-pause panels in one strip (previously held by Achewood)

Despite having now taken three months longer than the airplane people, we're making disappointingly little progress toward the obvious next stage of vehicle: The Unobtanium-hulled tunneling ship from the 2003 film 'The Core.'

We have this conversation at least once a day in my apartment

fMRI testing showed that subjects who don't agree to participate are much more likely to escape from the machine mid-scan.

Hint: If you ever encounter this puzzle in a crossword app, just [term for someone with a competitive and high-achieving personality].

Each particle also has a password which allows its properties to be changed, but the cosmic censorship hypothesis suggests we can never observe the password itself—only its secure hash.

Welcome to the Linguistics Department - It has been [2] [DAYS] since someone noticed that the Biology Department sign has a one-day-long singular/plural disagreement after it resets.

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.

I WONDERED why he kept asking whether we thought the impact speed was too low.

I remember trying to log in to the original Command and Conquer servers a year or two back and feeling like I was knocking on the boarded-up gates of a ghost town.

Well, the kid's definitely getting the biology geek phenotype.

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

'The sad thing is that I just wanted to talk about your poor smoke-bomb techniques.'

Pontoon bridges are just linear open-sided waterbeds.

It also works for anything you teach someone else to do. "Oh yeah, I trained a pair of neural nets, Emily and Kevin, to respond to support tickets."

Thank you to Katie Mack for teaching me about this effect, and to Janelle Shane for describing redshifts as 'like galaxies sinking into a pool of dilute blood,' which is how I'll see them from now on.

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

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

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

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

I pronounce epitome "EPPY-tome", but EpiPen "uh-PIE-pen".

Under three ounces, but it stains panties.

Whenever I see a picture of the moon where the points go more than halfway around, I assume it's being eclipsed by one of those Independence Day ships and interpret the rest of the image in light of that.

"You still can't walk into someone's house without being invited!" "What? Oh, I see your confusion. No, this vaccine is for a bat VIRUS. I'm fine with doorways and garlic and stuff."

Hmm, they won't do in-flight delivery, so let's order a new first and second stage to our emergency landing site and then try to touch down on top of them to save time.

Scary thought #138: Raptors coming down the waterslide behind me.

By my count, only 48 of the 158 minutes in Live Free or Die Hard have action. That's pathetic, guys. Crank is better, but needs a bigger budget and more Summer Glau.

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

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

Unstoppable force-carrying particles can't interact with immovable matter by definition.

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.

'--> [ Well, this is embarrassing. ] <--'

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

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

Not only is that terrible in general, but you just KNOW Billy's going to open the root present first, and then everyone will have to wait while the heap is rebuilt.

I feel bad for Earth 2 and their shadowflies.

The 95% confidence interval suggests Rexthor's dog could also be a cat, or possibly a teapot.

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

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

At the boundary between each zone, stories blend together. Somewhere in the New Mexico desert, the Roadrunner is pursued by a tireless Anton Chigurh.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

The 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.

I wonder what I was dreaming to prompt that. I hope it wasn't the Richard Stallman Cirque de Soleil thing again.

Surrounded by boring mysteries.

If you want to evenly space them, it's easiest to alternate between the Arctic and Antarctic. Some people just go to the Arctic twice, near the equinoxes so the visits are almost 6 months apart, but it's not the same.

I'm just worried that we'll all leave and you won't get to come along!

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

I'd traverse it myself, but it's singly linked, so I'm worried that I won't be able to find my way back to 2021.

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.

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

"So their universe wouldn't have the iconic photo of a screaming Truman being hoisted aloft by the newspaper-printing machinery..."

LIFEHACKS: You can just take all the luggage off the airport conveyer belt and leave with it. They don't check that it's yours at the door!

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

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.

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

Charles, I just talked to John and Mildred, who run that company selling seeds and nuts, and their kids with MOUTHS are starving!

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

Where I live, one of the most common categories of sky object without a weird obsessive spotting community is "lost birthday party balloons," so that might be a good choice—although you risk angering the marine wildlife people, and they have sharks.

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

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

[Astronomer peers into telescope] [Jaws theme begins playing]

Numbers can be tricky. On the day of my 110th birthday, I'll be one day younger than John Tukey was on his.

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.'

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

Curdled milk, of a peculiar kind, made after a Bulgarian recipe and called "yaghurt," is now a Parisian fad and is believed to be a remedy against growing old. A correspondent who has tried it, says he would prefer to die young. (1905, The Elk Falls Journal)

'Where were you when you learned you'd won?' 'I was actually asleep; I woke up when I refreshed the webite and saw the news.'

That eggplant is in something of a flaccid state.

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

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

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

A term coined by my friend Beth

I have this weird thing where if I don't drink enough water, I start feeling bad and then die of dehydration.

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

Roger Ebert once called you directionless and unwatchable.

I'll be honest--the 1950s were a rough time for cycling.

I'm as surprised as you!

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

There are two rules on this ship: Never gaze back into the projection abyss, and never touch the red button labeled DYMAXION.

This message brought to you by the Society of Astronomers Trapped on the Surface of a Sphere.

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

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

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

"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"

Maybe I should've tried Wexler?

Every year: 'It's <year>--I want my jetpack [and also my free medical care covering all my jetpack-related injuries]!'

Key West, Virginia is not to be confused with Key, West Virginia.

No other experiment has a lower false negative rate.

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

You could at least not wear the lab coat everywhere, dude.

Yet one more reason I'm barred from speaking at crypto conferences.

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

Getting the utility people to run transmission lines to Earth is expensive, but it will pay for itself in no time.

The most brutal way I've ever seen someone handle this was 'Oh, you have a girlfriend. Are you going to get married?' 'I, uh, don't know--' 'Well, do you love her?' '...' 'Anyway, what were you saying about the movie?'

It's going in A collection of satellites skewered with pins and mounted in display boxes. Not necessarily MY collection.

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

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

I would never stoop to vandalism, but I'm not above discreetly deleting the occasional 'this article contains excessive amounts of detail' tag.

The 'controlled demolition' theory was concocted by the government to distract us. '9/11 was an inside job' was an inside job!

Contains 100% of your recommended daily allowance!