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

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

It's *almost* enough to make me want to redo high school.

It's the NORMAL distribution, not the TANGENT distribution.

"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."

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

I've looked at clouds from both sides now.

The top search for every state is PORN, except Florida, where it's SEX PORN.

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

Just pretend you're kidding.

Verbiage. Va-jay-jay. Irregardless.

Don't we all.

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

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

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

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

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

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

As they're both unplugged, they do a lovely Daisy Daisy/Still Alive duet.

Although right now I'm more excited about ESPRESSO's radial velocity measurements, so I'm listening to This Kiss, her song about measuring "centrifugal motion" on "a rooftop under the sky".

It's always bothered me that you can't cancel out an inverter by putting a second inverter after it.

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!

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.

It IS about physics. It ALL is.

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

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

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

As the King of All Cosmos remarked, 'Is it that it's fun, or that it lets you forget yourself?'

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

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.

And nothing for 'I'm glad I saw Epic Movie.'

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.

After decades of increasingly confused arguing, Pluto is reclassified as a "dwarf Pluto."

After years of trying various methods, I broke this habit by pitting my impatience against my laziness. I decoupled the action and the neurological reward by setting up a simple 30-second delay I had to wait through, in which I couldn't do anything else, before any new page or chat client would load (and only allowed one to run at once). The urge to check all those sites magically vanished--and my 'productive' computer use was unaffected.

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.

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.

If history has taught us anything, we can use that information to destroy it.

This map preserves the shapes of Tissot's indicatrices pretty well, as long as you draw them in before running the resize.

This isn't an informational illustration; this is a thing I think we should do. First, we'll need a gigantic spool of thread. Next, we'll need some kind of ... hmm, time to head to Seattle.

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

I run a business selling rural internet access. My infrastructure consists of a bunch of Verizon wifi hotspots that I sign up for and then cancel at the end of the 14-day return period.

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

I'd like 0.4608 apples, please.

I watched from a beautiful nature reserve in central Missouri, and it was--without exaggeration--the coolest thing I've ever seen.

You can't stab Carl Kasell. He sounds all slow and stentorian, but he moves like a snake.

I'm going to tell the manufacturer that their business practices are ADMIRABLE and ETHICAL and their developers are ATTRACTIVE and I'm going to report them to the FCC for their IMPECCABLE VIRTUE.

Obama has been writing Lincoln/Obama erotic fan fiction on his secret livejournal. Excerpt: Lincoln lay back on the bed, nude save for his trademark stovepipe hat. 'Tell me,' he purred seductively, as he and Obama formed a more perfect union. 'When you come, is it 10% ethanol?'

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

Protip: You can win every exchange just by being one level more precise than whoever talked last. Eventually, you'll defeat all conversational opponents and stand alone.

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.

Mr. Rogers projected an air of genuine, unwavering, almost saintly pure-hearted decency. But when you look deeper, at the person behind the image ... that's exactly what you find there, too. He's exactly what he appears to be.

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

Biology is really struggling; they're barely at 93% and they keep finding more ants.

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

Wikipedia trivia: if you take any article, click on the first link in the article text not in parentheses or italics, and then repeat, you will eventually end up at "Philosophy".

No horse has yet managed the elusive Quadruple Crown—winning the Kentucky Derby, the Preakness, the Belmont Stakes, and the Missouri Horse Hole.

♫ When the spacing is tight / And the difference is slight / That's a moiré ♫

On one hand, you'll never be able to convince your parents to switch. On the other hand, you'll never be able to convince your parents to switch!

Whenever I miss a shot with a sci-fi weapon, I say 'Apollo retroreflector' really fast, just in case.

If you pledge more than $50 you'll get on the VIP list and have first dibs on a slot on ANY of the pledge levels in the actual campaign.

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.

My password is just every Unicode codepoint concatenated into a single UTF-8 string.

'All time machine systems nominal ... T-minus ten ... eleven ...'

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

Good to be a little wary of advice that sounds too much like a self pep talk.

I looked at some of the data dumps from vulnerable sites, and it was ... bad. I saw emails, passwords, password hints. SSL keys and session cookies. Important servers brimming with visitor IPs. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion, c-beams glittering in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. I should probably patch OpenSSL.

That cat has some serious periodic components

The less popular 8.8.4.4 is slated for discontinuation.

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

Cloud computing has a ways to go.

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."

Guest comic by Zach Weiner of Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal. When I was stressed out, Zach gave me a talk that was really encouraging and somehow involved nanobots.

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

Fortunately, the charging one has been solved now that we've all standardized on mini-USB. Or is it micro-USB? Shit.

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

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.

We're worried that a regular whale will get into a 30-foot-deep ocean trench section and filter-feed on all the tiny whales.

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

The 2007 Bridge to Terebithia trailer put me off too much to see that particular movie, but I am cautiously optimistic about Where the Wild Things Are.

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.

Gen-Z got a chunk of the Carboniferous, and now all their memes are about how pathetic and small today's dragonflies are.

I'm like a prisoner in Plato's Cave, seeing only the shade you throw on the wall.

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

Honestly feel a little sheepish about the amount of time and effort I spent confirming "yes, the vaccine helps protect people from getting sick and dying" but I guess everyone needs a hobby.

When they moved production from New Zealand to the UK and switched from the runny white centers to the thick, frosting-like filling, it got way harder to cook them scrambled.

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

The Antikythera mechanism had a whole set of gears specifically to track the cyclic popularity of skinny jeans and low-rise waists.

It's cool how, when there's a number lots of people are curious about, but which isn't easy to measure, some random guess will get cited everywhere and become the universally quoted value. Unrelatedly, did you know there are 850 trillion waves in the ocean?

Every few months, I think about sex every seven seconds and how weird and implausible it would be.

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

It was their main recruiting poster, hung nearly ten feet up a wall! This means the hackers have LADDER technology! Are we headed for a future where everyone has to pay $50 for one of those locked plexiglass poster covers? More after the break ...

Eventually they agreed to "an auto-retracting dog leash with one end clipped to your house, so you can press the button on the handle and water-ski home."

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

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

In the 60s, Marvin Minsky assigned a couple of undergrads to spend the summer programming a computer to use a camera to identify objects in a scene. He figured they'd have the problem solved by the end of the summer. Half a century later, we're still working on it.

It's pi plus C, of course.

My biggest fear is that colonial engineers will try to flood me to generate electricity. My biggest hope is that I'll develop sailing stones.

Check check check ... chhecck chhecck chhecck ... check check check

Some other studio should do the Antz/A Bug's Life thing and release The Dingbats Movie at the same time.

Actually, 'RSS&M' is kinda catchy.

The Street View van isn't going to find out anything Google won't already know from reading my email.

Though they do appreciate how much he improved the heating system for the flame pit.

Building codes in hurricane zones rely on studies of how easily flying debris can break residential windows. If you're looking for a science fair project idea and you hate your neighbors, I'm sure they could always use more data!

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

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

'It has a ghost in it. Take it back.' 'No.'

What sins could possibly darken the heart of a STEAMBOAT? I asked The Shadow, but he says he only covers men.

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

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

I always hate dragging around the larger archipelagos, but I appreciate how the Scandinavian peninsula flexes outward to create a snug pocket for Britain and Ireland.

When it explodes, it will cast off its outer layers, leaving behind nothing but a slowly fading PalmPilot, calculator, or two-way pager.

The E's wedding invitation definitely used the word LOVE more times than was strictly necessary.

"The Venn diagram of the sun and the moon is a circle." --someone being snarky at totality

A long, long time (plus 40 years) ago, in a galaxy far, far away (plus a corrective factor involving the Hubble constant) ...

I don't dig pit traps and cover them with sticks and a thin layer of leaves nearly as much as I expected; I find a chance to do it barely once a month.

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

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

During the most recent glacial maximum, it's believed that land bridges extended from the surfaces and connected several of the spheres together.

Are you the annoying spoon or the sleepy spoon?

Ingress: Foursquare With Space Noises.

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

The Hertzsprung-Russell diagram is located in its own lower right corner, unless you're viewing it on an unusually big screen.

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

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

Computer viruses currently fall somewhere between prions and fire.

We're considering installing a pressurization system to keep the tanks at constant pressure solely to deter them.

The ball's density also varies, but players don't learn the value until after choosing their raquets. The infamous 'bowling ball table tennis' region of the parameter space often leads to equipment damage.

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

But the past was much too cramped!

There's been a raccoon accident at an accordion bacchanalia! Double doses!

There's a cool mental calculation hack I recently learned for this: If you open the calendar app on your phone or computer, the highest-numbered box along the bottom is equal to the number of days in the month!

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.)

And given how much of my stuff they go through, they definitely know where I live.

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.

Take THAT, piece of 1980s-era infrastructure I've inexplicably maintained on my systems for 15 years despite never really learning how it works.

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

If the dysentery graph looks historically inaccurate it's because I got all my data from Oregon Trail.

Brace yourself--the chirp gets pretty weird.

"My parents were both omnitaurs, which is how I got interested in recombination," said the normal human.

The only things you HAVE to know are how to make enough of a living to stay alive and how to get your taxes done. All the fun parts of life are optional.

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

It hurts to be hit there, you know

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

It's hard to believe, but lots of kids these days ONLY know how to buy prepackaged molecules.

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

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

We should have you at the gate in just under two hours--two and a half if we get pulled over.

I call Rule 34 on The Secret House.

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

It was tricky.

Grandma's shelf-stable blackberry pie meson recipe was a huge seller until her farm was shut down by a joint FDA/NRC investigation.

The robot is pregnant. It isn't mine.

Officer suspended from horse.

Merry Christmas from xkcd!

The Hammer + Captain Tightpants == Captain Hammerpants?

Another thing that is a bad problem is if you're flying toward space and the parts start to fall off your space car in the wrong order. If that happens, it means you won't go to space today, or maybe ever.

Oh no, my marshmallow became tidally locked!

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

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

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.

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

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

Maybe I should've tried Wexler?

Did you shoot a man in Reno? Now, I don't mean to pry.

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

Plato made the solids, and five were gifted to the mathematicians. But in secret Plato forged a sixth solid to rule over all the others.

But one of the regulars in the channel is a girl!

Right now it's a bicycle wheel, so we've had to move to lighter vehicles, but the reduced overhead is worth it. There was one week when a wheel of cheese got dangerously close to the first page, though.

I laugh at the software as if I'm 100% confident that it's 2019.

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

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

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

Party Mode also enables the feature, but reverses the slider.

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

Each one contains a chocolate shaped like a famous spacecraft and, for the later numbers, a pamphlet on managing anxiety.

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

Can this PLEASE be drawing with replacement?

Bonus strip: just read the rightmost panels straight down.

On the other hand, poor Samara -- transcoded to FLV. No one deserves that.

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

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

413 nanohertz, by the way.

A death-first search is when you lose your keys and travel to the depths of hell to find them, and then if they're not there you start checking your coat pockets.

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

If you think space elevators are good, but just too boring and practical, check out the 'space fountain'.

Shoot for the Moon. If you miss, you'll end up co-orbiting the Sun alongside Earth, living out your days alone in the void within sight of the lush, welcoming home you left behind.

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

Aaron Sorkin has been tapped to write the TV movie about the aging prince's eventual election to Pat Toomey's Senate seat, currently titled either 'FRESHman Senator' or 'Mr. Smith Goes to Washington'.

If physics had a mafia, I'm pretty sure the BICEP2 mess would have ended in bloodshed.

I heard they might make the wild card game, which would be cool. Do you know when that is? I have a wedding next weekend, but if it's after that we could try to go!

In order to carry the necessary crafting supplies, they built the ships at 12:1 scale.

He actually installed each piece in a different car in the lot, then built a new car in the spot from the displaced pieces. It's a confusing maneuver known as the auto-troll shuffle.

Wait, what?

Hipster CDC Reports Flu Epidemic Peaked Years Ago

Chomskyists, generative linguists, and Ryan North, your days are numbered.

He's kind of an asshole, when you think about it

With most labs, the hushed horror stories are about something like dimethylmercury or prions, but occasionally you'll get a weird lab where it's about the soda machine or the drop ceiling.

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

'Automating' comes from the roots 'auto-' meaning 'self-', and 'mating', meaning 'screwing'.

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

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

'Why did you get into fluid dynamics?' 'Well, SOME planet has to have the coolest clouds, odds are it's not ours, and rockets are slow.'

Don't fire until you see through the fragile facade to the human being within.

I can't wait until this is all over and I can go back to riding my horse through the mall.

Even governmental elevator inspectors get bored halfway through asking where the building office is.

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

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

There are at least fourteen ways this could go badly (seventeen if that fork is a dangerous crossbreed.)

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

But he has a hat AND a toolbox! Where could someone planning a heist get THOSE?

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.

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

'It seems like it's still alive, Professor.' 'Yeah, a big one like this can keep running around for a few billion years after you remove the head."

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.

Nothing personal, high schoolers.

Poisson distributions have no value over negative numbers

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

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

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

I want this engraved on my tombstone like the Epitaph of Stevinus.

A lot of Jedi romances start with this turning into a Lady and the Tramp spaghetti situation.

I've seen advertisers put their URLs on chalkboards, encircled with a DNE. They went unerased for months. If you see this, feel free to replace the URL with xkcd.com.

'The mountains near here formed when the ... Newfoundland ... microplate collided with, uhh ... Labrador.' 'Ok, now you're definitely just naming dogs.' 'Wait, no, that's actually almost correct.'

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.

"I [suspect] that we are throwing more and more of our resources, including the cream of our youth, into financial activities remote from the production of goods and services, into activities that generate high private rewards disproportionate to their social productivity. I suspect that the immense power of the computer is being harnessed to this 'paper economy', not to do the same transactions more economically but to balloon the quantity and variety of financial exchanges." --James Tobin, July 1984

It has a section on motherboard beep codes that lists, for each beep pattern, a song that syncs up well with it.

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.

'Tin pest' makes more sense to me. Tin just doesn't want to be locked down in a shape like that. I get it. But why would any metal want to grow hair??

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

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

'Fucking ineffable' sounds like someone remembering how to do self-censorship halfway through a phrase.

And no avian society ever develops space travel because it's impossible to focus on calculus when you could be outside flying.

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

The captain has turned on the 'fasten seat belt' sign.

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

Mr. Jones, watch out for Ms. Lenhart! She's from genus Photuris!

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

'Grandpa, what was it like in the Before time?' 'It was hell. People went around saying glass was a slow-flowing liquid. You folks these days don't know how good you have it.'

I would subscribe to a Twitter feed that supplied you with one reasonable sports opinion per day, like 'The Red Sox can't make the playoffs (championship games), but in last night's game their win seriously damaged the chances of the Yankees (longstanding rival team).'

I wonder what year I'll discard the last weird food item that I bought online in early 2020.

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

A lot of these are actually non-venomous, but I can see which species you mistook them for. If you pause the crane for a sec I can give you some ID pointers for next time!

RIP, Gary.

Fun fact: if you say this every time a professor does something to a complex-number equation that drops the imaginary part, they'll eventually move the class to another room and tell everyone else except you.

Opening dialogue by Scott

That's very exciting! The bad news is that it's a risk factor for a lot of things.

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!

All our teams make an effort to stay optimistic, but I will say that once our virus division saw the vaccine efficacy data, they started asking for payment up front.

Well, *I* think I'm real. Look at me. Look at my face. Cut me and I'll bleed. What more do you want? Please don't go.

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

I had fun visiting the museum at Dover Air Force Base, unless they don't have a museum, in which case I've never been to Delaware in my life.

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

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.

If you pick a low enough orbit, it gives you a lot of freedom to use a lightweight launch vehicle such as a stepladder.

Want to feel old? The 'want to feel old?' factoid meme dates back to around 2011, closer to the Bush/Kerry election than to today.

Qua qua qua is the sine qua non of sine qua non qua sine qua non.

There's no "I" in "VOWELS".

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

If you close an account while it's still friends with people, it contributes to database linkage accumulation slowdown, which is a major looming problem for web infrastructure and definitely not a thing I just made up.

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.

"Hey guys! I have a great idea for a migration!" "Dammit, Kevin."

I learned from Achewood that since this poem is in ballad meter, it can be sung to the tune of Gilligan's Island. Since then, try as I might, I haven't ONCE been able to read it normally.

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

'No idea what I was thinking! Haha! But anyway, maybe we should check out what this Ba'al guy has to say.'

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

C'mon, ESA Solar Orbiter team, just give the Parker probe a LITTLE nudge at aphelion. Crash it into the sun. Fulfill the dream of Icarus. It is your destiny.

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?

College Board issues aside, I have fond memories of TI-BASIC, writing in it a 3D graphing engine and a stock market analyzer. With enough patience, I could make anything ... but friends. (Although with my chatterbot experiments, I certainly tried.)

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

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

They offered to make me a green beret, but I liked my regular one. Although it gets kind of squashed under my helmet.

Hobby: seeing how many menu selections you can get someone to go through before they realize you're not an automated system and/or hang up.

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

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

The moment their arms spun freely in our air, they were doomed -- for Man has earned his right to hold this planet against all comers, by virtue of occasionally producing someone totally batshit insane.

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?

Hello and welcome to Millibar Millibarn Attometer, an advice show for the Planck era.

Neither group uses iso 8601 because the big-endian enthusiasts were all at the meeting 20 years ago.

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!

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 Credible Machine

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

It's important to keep the spider from touching your face.

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

m-x machineofdeath-mode

The bottom of the list remains unchanged. Poor Rutherford Birchard Hayes.

I'll never forget you--at least, the parts of you that were important red flags.

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

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

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

That's a gneiss butte.

Man, this emo shit was supposed to be for people who didn't have hats.

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.

I don't know what's worse -- that there exists broken-hard-drive-sound techno, or that it's not half bad.

Sometimes the best fun looks like boredom.

Reductio ad absurdum fails when reality is absurd.

Earth's r_jf is approximately 1.5 light-days, leading to general relativity's successful prediction that all the frogs in the Solar System should be found collected on the surface of the Earth.

Why I'm Moving Most of My Social Activity to Slack, Then Creating a Second Slack to Avoid the People in the First One, Then Giving Up on Social Interaction Completely, Then Going Back to Texting

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

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

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

Wishbone and the Illustrated Classics series have gotten me through every conversation I've ever had about Dickens, Treasure Island, The Anarchist's Cookbook, and Our Bodies, Ourselves.

Within five minutes of the Singularity appearing, somebody will suggest defragging it.

1. Nf3 ... ↘↘↘ 2. Nc3 ... ↘↘↘ 0-1

His books were kinda intimidating; rappelling down through his skylight seemed like the best option.

The only other person to walk by was a linguist back in the 80s, but she just spent a while dissecting the phrase 'help me down' before getting distracted by a squirrel and wandering off.

She's pretty sharp when provoked.

Maybe someday science will get over its giant collective crush on Richard Feynman. But I doubt it!

Inflationary cosmologists call all music from after the first 10^-30 seconds "post-"

I need a lawn, so I can yell at kids to stay off it.

They'd use that Futurama episode with Fry's dog, but even spambots cry at that.

I would be honored, but I know I don't belong in your network. The person you invited was someone who had not yet inflicted this two-year ordeal upon you. I'm no longer that person.

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.

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.

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

Geologists claim it's because the earlier Cenozoic used to be called the Tertiary, but that's just a ruse to hide the secret third geologic period, between the Neogene and the Quaternary, that they won't tell us about.

It's like you tried to define a formal grammar based on fragments of a raw database dump from the QuickBooks file of a company that's about to collapse in an accounting scandal.

'The world's greatest [whatever]' is subjective, but 'One of the world's greatest [whatever]s' is clearly objective. Anyway, that's why I got you this 'one of the world's greatest moms' mug!

20 balloons float away while I'm busy permanently tying one to a tree to deal with it for good. Unfortunately, that one balloon was 'land a rocket on the moon in Kerbal Space Program.'

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

It took a lot of booster rockets, but luckily Amazon had recently built thousands of them to bring Amazon Prime same-day delivery to the Moon colony.

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

A universe that needed someone to observe it in order to collapse it into existence would be a pretty sorry universe indeed.

Fun game: try to post a YouTube comment so stupid that people realize you must be joking. (Hint: this is impossible)

1937-2020

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

A breadth-first search makes a lot of sense for dating in general, actually; it suggests dating a bunch of people casually before getting serious, rather than having a series of five-year relationships one after the other.

In a tribute to classical Latin, I started pronouncing it 'per-kent.' Eventually my friends had to resort to spritzing me with a water bottle like a cat to train me out of it.

The tumbleweed then tried to roll off into the sunset, but due to the Old West's placement north of the subtropical ridge, the prevailing winds were in the wrong direction.

But then she does that thing with her tongue and I remember why I left you.

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

I know having so many base pairs makes rebasing complicated, but you're in Bilateria, so shouldn't you at LEAST be better at using git head?

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

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

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

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.

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

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

"Isn't the original Jurassic Park your favorite movie of all time?" "Yes, but that's because I like dinosaurs and I WANT there to be an island full of them. If John Hammond's lab had been breeding serial killers in creepy masks, I wouldn't have watched!" "Wait, are you sure? That could actually be good." "Ok, I WOULD watch the scenes where Jeff Goldblum tries to convince a bunch of executives that the park is a bad idea."

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

And from that day on, I wore this little 'F' key pendant everywhere I went.

A term coined by my friend Beth

Hey, it says here that if you dream about your teeth falling out, it means they're spreading.

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.

The universe is probably littered with the one-planet graves of cultures which made the sensible economic decision that there's no good reason to go into space--each discovered, studied, and remembered by the ones who made the irrational decision.

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

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

'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.'

"Some people say light is waves, and some say it's particles, so I bet light is some in-between thing that's both wave and particle depending on how you look at it. Am I right?" "YES, BUT YOU SHOULDN'T BE!"

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

I'm not sure if this is actually true

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

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

Okay, now just as the loss hits him, slam on the brakes.

I'd press on them to try to unstick them, but I can't reach. Can we try cycling day and night really fast?

Donate now to help us find a cure for causality. No one should have to suffer through events because of other events.

But the rind is where all the vitamins are!

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

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

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

Constantly stopping these briefings halfway through is becoming a pain.

The USGS operates a really neat email/SMS earthquake notification service (earthquake.usgs.gov/ens/) that allows fine-grained control of notifications.

Thanks for bringing us along.

There's planned downtime every night when we turn on the Roomba and it runs over the cord.

'List of helicopter prison escapes' and 'List of sexually active popes' are both entertainingly long, but sadly there's no 'List of helicopter prison escapes involving sexually active popes.'

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

The worst resolution to the Valentine Prisoner's Dilemma when YOU decide not to give your partner a present but your PARTNER decides to testify against you in the armed robbery case.

I make tools for managing job-hunting sites for people who make tools for managing job-hunting sites for people who make tools for ...

It was the funniest 6.5 seconds of my life, although as usual like 80% of it was just Tom and Ray's gasping, hacking laughter.

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

[Political pundit on the ScrabbleTV News channel] "After four years of defying orthographic pressure, Joe ceded the top of the ticket to Kamala, who--after considering Josh, Mark, Andy, Roy, and Pete--picked Tim."

I will vote, no questions asked, for any candidate who describes themselves as 'more of a deficit sugar glider.'

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

Oh, weird, Amazon is out of butterfly nets.

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

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

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

This was my friend David's idea

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

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

Wait, damn, I think I spotted a new email on the last refresh.

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

After my absent-mindedness resulted in a bad posterboard-related stomachache, I learned to do the sign-making place last.

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

Be careful fighting gravity. If you win, it's a long way down.

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

Otherwise known as Margaret the Destroyer, I will bring pain to the the Great One. Then again, maybe I won't.

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

'YOUR CLOTHES. GIVE THEM TO ME.' 'Shit, uh ... you are now breathing manually!' 'I AM ALWAYS BREATHING MANUALLY.'

People think power over ethernet is so great, and yet when I try to do water over ethernet everyone yells at me.

Cesium-133, let it be. Cesium-134, let it be even more.

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.