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

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

Of course, you don't wanna limit yourself to the strict forms of the meter. That could get pretty difficult.

I asked a few friends whether they'd had this happen, then looked up the popularity of their initials/names over time. Based on those numbers, it looks like there must be at least 750,000 people in the US alone who think 'Sure, that's probably my email address' on a regular basis.

Researchers claim to have synthesized six additional elements in the second row, temporarily named 'pentium' through 'unnilium'.

I'm trying to prove that mathematics forms a meta-abelian group, which would finally confirm my suspicions that algebraic geometry and geometric algebra are the same thing.

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

You know I've always hated her.

I've looked at clouds from both sides now.

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

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

[They do not move.]

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

Don't need any, thanks. I have a backscattering fetish.

This is also one of only five identified situations in which a vuvuzela is actually appropriate.

Strictly speaking, 'violin' refers to the internal structure of the data. The external portion visible in the plot is called the 'viola.'

The only winning move is to play, perfectly, waiting for your opponent to make a mistake.

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

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

Not actual size, except technically at one spot near the left.

I don't think the Lakeshore Air Crash Museum really belongs under 'Tourist Attractions.' It's not a museum--it's just an area near the Lake Festival Laser Show where a lot of planes have crashed.

They're not generally used for crewed spacecraft because astronauts HATE going around the corners.

Detectives say the key to tracking down the source of the kites was a large wall map covered in thumbtacks and string. 'It's the first time that method has ever actually worked,' said a spokesperson.

Legally-mandated information would be printed on the back or discreetly along the bottom. In small letters under the nutrition information it would say 'Like our products? Visit our website!' There would be no URL.

If you're thinking 'Wait, a giant crystal cave in Mexico? What's that?' then I'm SO excited for the image search you're about to do.

Alexa defeated her in a battle hinging on the ability to set multiple timers.

There's also a +1 sometimes, which is there to keep everyone on their toes. In the future, people who got to pick cool numbers by signing up for Google Voice early will be revered as wizards.

'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.'

Under the two-domain system, anyone who punches you is technically an Archaean pathogen.

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.

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.'

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

Nonrewritable tape?

Billboard's "Best of the 80s" chart includes Blondie's 1980 hit "Call Me." QED.

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

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

As the editor has reportedly defeated Death in a series of games of skill, no further obituaries are expected.

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

My pal Emad does this all the time. 'Hey man, which way to the airpart?'

[later] I don't get why our pizza slices have such terrible reviews; the geotextile-infused sauce gives the toppings incredible slope stability!

There are some papers arguing that there's a volcanic component, but I personally think they're just feeling guilty and trying to cover the trail.

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

The floor should be slightly curved, but we haven't figured out artificial gravity yet, so for now we just added a trace intoxicating gas to the air that messes with your inner ear and gives you a sense that the ground is tilting away from you.

Chemists actually find it simpler to define a general odor of rotten eggs as a baseline, and the LACK of rotten eggs as a distinct smell.

I'm trying to build character but Eclipse is really confusing.

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.

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

James Cameron has said that he didn't know its song would be so beautiful. He didn't close the door in time. He's sorry.

Bloody Mary is made of antimatter. It explains so much.

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!

In-universe, Bart Simpson and Harry Potter were the same age in 1990. Bart is perpetually 10 years old because of a spell put on his town by someone trying to keep him from getting his Hogwarts letter.

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

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

J.J. Thompson won a Nobel Prize for his work in electricity in gases, but was unfairly passed over for his "An atom is plum pudding, and plum pudding is MADE of atoms! Duuuuude." theory.

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

The 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?'

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.

Hey, golf balls float on lava, so this should make recovering them from the hazards easier.

If you're planning to challenge the royal family, you should probably wait 6-8 weeks, since a number of the younger ones have diplomas and Kate was actually on the varsity lightsaber team at St Andrews.

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

$On the other hand, the refractor's limited light-gathering means it's unable to make out shadow people or the dark god Chernabog.$

I'm working to bring about a superintelligent AI that will eternally torment everyone who failed to make fun of the Roko's Basilisk people.

My resonant tunneling diode phone has limited range but a short enough wavelength to penetrate even the densest cages. This gives me a major combat advantage, hopefully.

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

Many things about Star Wars were not well planned out, but having a 37-year-old in old-age makeup play the Emperor in Return of the Jedi was such an incredible call.

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

1916: 'PHYSICIST DAD' TURNS HIS ATTENTION TO GRAVITY, AND YOU WON'T BELIEVE WHAT HE FINDS. [PICS] [NSFW]

Worries assuaged, the numbers become less important than your touches.

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

I mean, if it's that easy to get a theorem named for you ... "a straight line that passes through the center of a coplanar circle always divides the circle into two equal halves." Can I have that one? Wait, can I auction off the naming rights? It can be the Red Bull Theorem or the Quicken Loans Theorem, depending who wants it more.

I call Rule 34 on Wolfram's Rule 34.

I'm a big fan of Kurt Halsey

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

If you ask "why are leaves green?" the usual answer is "because they're full of chlorophyll, and chlorophyll is green," even though "why does chlorophyll scatter green light?" is a great question too.

It's okay, they can figure out which control positions produce scalding water via a trial-and-error feedback loop with a barely-perceptible 10-second lag.

You also refuse to buy Cisco products because you hate the Thong Song, O. Henry, Deep Space Nine, freshwater whitefish, teenaged Incan emperors, Brak's brother, and vegetable-based shortening.

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

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.

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

A long time in the future, in a galaxy far, far, away, astronomers in the year 2008 sight an unusual gamma-ray burst originating from somewhere far across the universe.

Contains 100% of your recommended daily allowance!

Telescopes and bathyscaphes and sonar probes of Scottish lakes, Tacoma Narrows bridge collapse explained with abstract phase-space maps, some x-ray slides, a music score, Minard's Napoleonic war: the most exciting new frontier is charting what's already here.

Listen, I'm not a fan of the Spanish Inquisition OR predatory multi-level marketing schemes...

We have met the enemy and he is us.

I like the idea of cartograms (distorted population maps), but I feel like in practice they often end up being the worst of both worlds—not great for showing geography OR counting people. And on top of that, they have all the problems of a chloro... chorophl... chloropet... map with areas colored in.

Let's get dinner after we promptly destroy all the X-7 we've manufactured.

To motivate it to fire its harpoons hard enough, Rosetta's Philae lander has been programmed to believe it is trying to kill the comet.

If you think THAT'S unethical, you should see the stuff we approved via our Placebo IRB.

==COSMOLOGY==> 'Uhhh ... how sure are we that everything is made of these?'

The text ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US with a lengthy footnote explaining that I got this tattoo in 2020 and not, as you may assume, 2001, but offering no further clarification.

I don't see why everyone is so hungry for BAD news, but fine, I'll give in to feedback and add a dark mode.

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

Google and Yelp keep deleting my scathing reviews of the Mariana Trench, the Chernobyl reactor core, the jet stream, and the equator.

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

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

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

It was also fun when those teenagers tried to egg our house and it insta-cooked the eggs in mid-air.

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.

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.

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

Given the role they play in every process in my body, really, they deserve this award more than me. Just gotta figure out how to give it to them. Maybe I can cut it into pieces to make it easier to swallow ...

In 1899, people were walking around shouting '23' at each other and laughing, and confused reporters were writing articles trying to figure out what it meant.

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

She also starts every letter with "Dear Future <your name>".

We're not trapped in here with the coronavirus. The coronavirus is trapped in here with us.

I once worked on a friend's dad's computer. He had the hard drive divided into six partitions, C: through J:, with a 'Documents' directory tree on each one. Each new file appeared to be saved to a partition at random. I knew enough not to ask.

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

'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.

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

Billy Joel briefly detained

It's not going to break the fan, bouncing a rubber ball off the wall isn't going to dent it, and the roof can hold me just fine. You LIED!

Brace yourself--the chirp gets pretty weird.

The 78-rpm era was closer to the Civil War than to today.

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.

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

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

Opening dialogue by Scott

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'.

"Want to feel old?" "Yes."

Also possibly several miles beyond that.

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

Other pollsters complain about declining response rates, but our poll showed that 96% of respondents would be 'somewhat likely' or 'very likely' to agree to answer a series of questions for a survey.

The few dozen doors that have little Christmas trees on them are a nice touch.

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

autoexec code posted by verified twitter users

Resulting in The Little Rock 9x + C.

A few minutes later, the goat from behind door C drives away in the car.

There has long been debate about Big Bird's species, with some experts claiming he was a canary, but recent genetic analysis places him firmly in Cariamiformes.

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

And they choose Al Gore as Internet Secretary.

BABIES OR LITERATURE BUT NOT BOTH: Baby shoes

From Google Trends, it looks like the lag between people Googling cocktail recipes and 'hangover cure' is 14 hours.

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

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

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

Grandma says that because of differences in primate and feline lifespans, the cat is actually my 17,000,000th cousin 14,000,000 times removed.

I'm so bad at carrying a tune, those 'find a song by humming its melody' websites throw an HTTP 406 error as soon as I start to hum.

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.

OCEAN PLAY AREA RULES: No running, no horseplay, no megatsunamis, and no trying to pry the wreck of the Titanic off the bottom.

For scientists, this can be the hardest thing about dreams.

The only effect on the history books were a few confusing accounts of something called 'Greek fire.'

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

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

It's okay, we can just feed the one-pixel image into an AI upscaler and recover the original image, or at least one that's just as cool.

Despite a reputation for safety, the temperatures and surprisingly high pressures make them even more dangerous than the air kind, but the NTSB refuses to investigate accidents because they insist there is no 'transportation' involved.

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

The next day: 'What? Six bank robberies!? But I just vandalized the library!' 'Nice try. They saw your plate with all the 1's and I's.' 'That's impossible! I've been with my car the whole ti-- ... wait. Ok, wow, that was clever of her.'

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

Roundly-condemned headlinese initiative shuttered indefinitely.

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.

And a different ghost has replaced me in the bedroom.

'Smilodon fatalis' narrowly edged out 'Tyrannosaurus rex' to win this year's Most Badass Latin Names competition, after edging out 'Dracorex hogwartsia' and 'Stygimoloch spinifer' (meaning 'horned dragon from the river of death') in the semifinals.

There used to be these ads, see . . .

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

"Of these four forces, there's one we don't really understand." "Is it the weak force or the strong--" "It's gravity."

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

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

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.

In my new scale, °X, 0 is Earths' record lowest surface temperature, 50 is the global average, and 100 is the record highest, with a linear scale between each point and adjustment every year as needed.

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.

Tired of waiting on hold? Use our website to chat with one of our live agents, who are available to produce words at you 24/7!

My hobby: Pretending to miss the sarcasm when people show off their lack of interest in football by talking about 'sportsball' and acting excited to find someone else who's interested, then acting confused when they try to clarify.

Little-known fact: The 'Dawn of Man' opening sequence in 2001 cuts away seconds before the Flintstones theme becomes recognizable.

In sixty million years aliens will know humans only by a fuzzy clip of a woman in an Axe commercial.

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

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

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

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

Oh no, they set up a roadblock which is just a sign with the entire 'Czech hedgehog' article printed on it.

There's a heated debate over whether the big island of Tierra del Fuego should qualify for membership.

Though 100 years is longer than a lot of our resources.

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.

It wasn't originally constitutionally required, but presidents who served two terms have traditionally followed George Washington's example and gotten false teeth.

Nowadays the only ones left that do anything are turtles.

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

Ugh, and we JUST went through this yesterday with javelin.

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

Positive vibes/longitudes only

You think, 'okay, THIS is an ideal use case for hardlinks!' but then 6 months later you're doing some extremely cursed Google search like 'javascript ext4' and wondering where things went wrong.

And the whole setup is just a trap to capture escaping logicians. None of the doors actually lead out.

We're going to need to modify the surface to mount it on the test stand. Which ocean basin do you like the least?

In fact, draw all your rotational matrices sideways. Your professors will love it! And then they'll go home and shrink.

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

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

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

The LINACs in the glasses frames can barely manage one MeV. You should've gone to the screening at CERN.

We're adding some industrial flypaper to minimize reflection or scattering of customers who might complain.

And every day it gets harder to fight the urge to su to the user and freak people out.

SPIDER PSYCHOLOGY (21st Ed.) is a comprehensive overview of arachnoneurology, neuro-arachnology, forensic arachnology, neuro-arachnoneurology (the study of the brains of spider neurology experts), and arachnoarachnology (the study of too many spiders).

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

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

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

Hey Rob, sorry it took me a while to get back to you! Sure, I'd love to see WALL-E opening weekend! Are you still doing that, or...?

I bet she gets you to mow the lawn, doesn't she?

Careful mathematical analysis demonstrates small-scale irregularities in Gaussian distribution

It's just that I get nervous about heights.

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

The SpaceX system carefully guides falling phones down to the surface, a process which the phones increasingly often survive without exploding.

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

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.

Sadly, it probably won't even have enough gas to make it to the first border crossing.

Presented in partnership with Qualcomm, Craigslist, Whirlpool, Hostess, LifeStyles, and the US Chamber of Commerce. Manufactured on equipment which also processes peanuts. Price includes 2-year Knicks contract. Phone may extinguish nearby birthday candles. If phone ships with Siri, return immediately; do not speak to her and ignore any instructions she gives. Do not remove lead casing. Phone may attract/trap insects; this is normal. Volume adjustable (requires root). If you experience sudden tingling, nausea, or vomiting, perform a factory reset immediately. Do not submerge in water; phone will drown. Exterior may be frictionless. Prolonged use can cause mood swings, short-term memory loss, and seizures. Avert eyes while replacing battery. Under certain circumstances, wireless transmitter may control God.

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

The 8th panel is my favorite

(1) That shopping cart is full of AirHeads, and (2) I died at 41 from what the AirHeads company spokesperson called 'probably natural causes.'

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

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

Replace the pendulums with history students and you'll qualify for a grant!

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.

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

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

Love and circuit analysis, hand in hand at last.

The new crowd is heavily shaped by this guy named Eric, who's basically the Paris Hilton of the amateur plastic crazy straw design world.

If you want to be extra safe, check that there's a big block of jumbled characters at the bottom.

People keep trying to come up with reasons that we should worry about the magnetic field collapsing or reversing, but honestly I think it's fine. Whatever minor problems it causes will be made up for by the mid-latitude auroras.

ISO 8601 was published on 06/05/88 and most recently amended on 12/01/04.

"Are you concerned the witches won't breed in captivity?" "Honestly, we're more concerned that they WILL. We don't know what it involves, but our biologists theorize that it's 'harrowing.'"

'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 ...'

Except the people filtering in late are the partiers, so you end up with drunken makeouts in the living room and the next roommate to return home has to sleep in the hall lounge orbital.

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

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

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

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.

AAAAAA A ÃA̧AȂA̦ ǍÅÂÃĀÁȂ AAAAAAA!

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

James Cameron's Terminator 3 was the REALLY prophetic one. That's why Skynet sent a robot back to the 1990s to prevent him from ever making it, ultimately handing the franchise over to other directors.

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

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

I wanted us to try finding an approximate numeric solution, but noooo.

[Earlier, at the eye doctor] 'No, for the last time, the numerals on the paper aren't my prescription, it's the shape I want you to make with the laser.'

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.

Mal, Simon, Wash, Zoe, River, Kaylee, Jayne, Inara, Book.

Scientists still don't know how marine biologists manage to so consistently bring up whalefall ecosystems, when relevant conversational openings are so few and far between.

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

According to my mom, my first word was (looking up at the sky) 'Wow!'

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

Fire is actually a potential biosignature, since it means something is filling the atmosphere with an unstable gas like oxygen. If we find a planet covered in flames, it might be an indicator that it supports life. Or used to, anyway, before the fire.

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

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

If we can get a brood of 13-year cicadas going, we might have a chance at making this happen before the oceans evaporate under the expanding sun.

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

There are also a lot of global versions of this map showing traffic to English-language websites which are indistinguishable from maps of the location of internet users who are native English speakers.

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

Real analysis is way realer than I expected.

Note: How To will teach you lots of cool stuff about technology, data storage, butterfly migration, and more. Also you will never see your files again.

CELEBRATE: Serve passengers tiered cakes shaped like the airspace class diagram

Do you make a distinction between shallots, scallops, and scallions? If you use all three words, do they all have different meanings, all the same, or are two the same and one different?

Someday, some big historical event will happen during the DST changeover, and all the tick-tock articles chronicling how it unfolded will have to include a really annoying explanation next to their timelines.

A lot of the highway department's budget goes to adjusting the sign whenever the moon passes directly overhead.

'Arrest me, I'm a skateboarder' is an even more obnoxious variant.

The Fujita Scale was replaced by the Enhanced Fujita Scale in 2007, but I think 'EF-5' sounds stupid, so I vote we just use the new measurements for assigning numbers but still call them 'F-whatever'.

By the third trimester, there will be hundreds of babies inside you.

They managed to briefly hit the top of the rankings when they rejected everyone except one applicant, published 5 billion research papers that just said "Hi," and hired one of their graduates for $50 trillion/year (then fired them after 10 microseconds.)

In contrast to Pascal's Wager Triangle, Pascal's Triangle Wager argues that maybe God wants you to draw a triangle of numbers where each one is the sum of the two numbers above it, so you probably should, just in case.

Why did we even have that thing?

Today's consumers who order their drones off the internet don't know the joy of going out in nature and returning with a drone that you caught yourself, whose angry owners you fought off with your own two hands.

I tried to train an AI to repair my Python environment but it kept giving up and deleting itself.

I've lived in the present for my whole life and I'm not about to move now.

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.

Washington state is seeing great success with reintroducing the Columbia River Basin subpopulation. We cannot allow them to further widen the interstate bun gap.

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?

But I've made $13.72 already today! Ow, stop throwing pennies.

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

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

'We're shocked by the Notre Dame fire. Click for our tribute to--' [okay] 'Now that we're all staying at home these past few weeks thanks to this new coronavirus, we--' [okay]

It's like I've always said--people just need more common sense. But not the kind of common sense that lets them figure out that they're being condescended to by someone who thinks they're stupid, because then I'll be in trouble.

'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!

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

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

"Wait, so in this version is Frankenstein also the doctor's name?" "No, he's just 'The Doctor'."

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

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

Sometimes an impulsive 2:00 AM cross-country trip is the only solution.

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.

Which is, coincidentally, the most unsettling mantlepiece decoration in my house.

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

You think it's so legendarily bad that you'll torrent it and sit through it just for the kitschy nerd cred. I, too, once thought as you did.

You'd think 'linguistics' would go to someone important in the field, but it's actually assigned to a random student in Ohio who barely graduated and then went into automotive marketing.

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

413 nanohertz, by the way.

Every downhill walk is a waterslide that might have been.

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

To get more knowledge

The only one of these games I really played was Area 51

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

The heat index is calculated via looking up the "effective temperature" in a table of air temperature and humidity values, and then adding a bunch more degrees because it feels WAY hotter than that.

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

The full analysis is of course much more complicated, but I can't stay to talk about it because I have a date.

If you draw a diagonal line from lower left to upper right, that's the ICP 'Miracles' axis.

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

It's okay, they scan the serial numbers and make sure you can't deposit the same bill more than once.

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

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.

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

'Yeah, that squid's a total asshole.' [scoot scoot]

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

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."

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

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

The biggest expense was installing the mantle ducts to keep the carbonate-silicate cycle operating.

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.

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

The math and philosophy people also claim everything, but the astronomers argue that the stuff they study really only comprises a small number of paper surfaces.

Although bees with tires would be kinda funny.

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

If you think curiosity without rigor is bad, you should see rigor without curiosity.

Seventh year: Perfectly coherent words, but in the pet's language, not mine.

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

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

'Beyond that lies a vale of fire through which my vision cannot penetrate' is the kind of fun thing geologists, heliophysicists, and early universe cosmologists have a lot of opportunities to say.

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

Obligatory bad guy: This operation is sheer foolishness, and it's not happening on my watch! Mainly because I can't figure out how to adjust the time.

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

The symbol for degrees Felsius is an average of the Euro symbol (€) and the Greek lunate epsilon (ϵ).

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

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

And it doesn't pop up a box every time asking you to use your real name. In fact, there's no way to set your name at all. You just have to keep reminding people who you are.

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

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

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

Hey, when you're done draining the syrup, just leave the hole, okay?

"Mr. President, what if the unthinkable happens? What if the launch goes wrong, and Napoleon is not stranded on the Moon?" "Have Safire write up a speech."

SELECT * FROM GHOSTS

It's been extra bad ever since my GPS got stuck on Phoebe Judge mode.

I can't remember where I heard this, but someone once said that defending a position by citing free speech is sort of the ultimate concession; you're saying that the most compelling thing you can say for your position is that it's not literally illegal to express.

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!

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

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.

'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.

Wait, is that the ORIGINAL voynich manuscript? Where did you GET that? Wanna try playing a round of Druids and Dicotyledons?

Ahem. We are STRICTLY an Orbiter shop.

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"

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

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

But the past was much too cramped!

The test didn't (spoiler alert) destroy the world, but the fact that they were even doing those calculations makes theirs the coolest jobs ever.

[holding up a three-phase motor] As you can see here, the problem is that the humidifier I took this from is broken.

In retrospect, I shouldn't have used each layer of the OSI model as one of my horcruxes.

Colorado is working to develop coherent amber waves, which would allow them to finally destroy Kansas and Nebraska with a devastating but majestic grain laser.

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

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

( MSTE ( AR ) CD )

Hey, before you go, can you explain to me what job I now have?

I'M SORRY, FROM YOUR YEARS OF CONDESCENDING TOWARD THE 'SQUISHY SCIENCES', I ASSUMED YOU'D BE A LITTLE HARDER.

I was going to get you an alarm clock that occasionally goes off randomly in the middle of the night, but you can ignore it and go back to sleep and it's fine.

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

When I was little I had trouble telling my dad apart from the dog. I always recognized my mom because she had a bunch of extra plutoniums in her middle. I never did ask her why ...

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!

True story: I had to try several times to upload this comic because my ssh key was blacklisted.

Let's invite him to a party and play 'I never'. Okay, I never hid any bodies SOUTH of Main Street. ... he's taking a drink!

Bacteria still outweigh us thousands to one--and that's not even counting the several pounds of them in your body.

The other half has some cool shipwrecks, rocks, and snakes, but if you move those out of the way, it also has more sky.

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

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

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

$Then we move to phase two. Gas stations store fuel in underground tanks. Normally, these are inaccessible except via the pump. However, with hydraulic fracturing, we-- Wait! Come back!$

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.

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

I don't trust mantle/core geologists because I suspect that, if they ever get a chance to peel away the Earth's crust, they'll do it in a heartbeat.

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

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

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

The ISO 216 standard ratio is cos(45°), but American letter paper is 8.5x11 because it uses radians, and 8.5/11 = pi/4.

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

Depending what corners of the internet you hang out on, 'regular' may at times awkwardly coexist with 'sexy.'

'The monospaced-typewriter-font story is a COMPLETE FABRICATION! WAKE UP, SHEEPLE' 'It doesn't matter! Studies support single spaces!' 'Those results weren't statistically significant!' 'Fine, you win. I'm using double spaces right now!' 'Are not! We can all hear your stupid whitespace.'

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

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.

As the 'exotic animals in homemade aprons hosting baking shows' YouTube craze reached its peak in March 2020, Andrew Cuomo announced he was replacing the Statue of Liberty with a bronze pangolin in a chef's hat.

*click* Let him know he's got a stain on his shirt, though.

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.

Hourly haircuts would be annoying, but they'd be easier to do yourself, since you'd have adjacent hairs as a guide. Growing it out would be a huge pain, though.

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

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

'We can also use middle names in place of first pet's names, but yours is something incomprehensible about dropping tables.'

"Technically that sentence started with 'well', so--" "Ooh, a rock with a fossil in it!"

It's taken me 20 years, but I've finally finished rebuilding all my software to use 33-bit signed ints.

I just call all of them 'synecdoche'.

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

Our lawyers were worried because it turns out the company inherits its debt from the parent universe, but luckily cosmic inflation reduced it to nearly zero.

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

â€œIf you can read this, congratulationsâ€”the archive youâ€™re using still knows about the mouseover textâ€!

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

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

Apparently Google assumes you're traveling during the ferry's normal operating hours. We lost two hours circling that damn lake (to say nothing of the Straw Man).

You were on the internet before I was born? Well, so was I.

I'm sure the building inspectors will approve my design once they finally manage to escape.

It's commonly known that too much perspective can be a downer.

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.

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.

So he's saying that God thought Hitler's art was so bad that the Holocaust was an acceptable alternative. It's no secret that the hat guy is closely based on Aram, from Men in Hats.

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

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

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

Our experiment will be expensive, but we believe it will produce important spin-offs, especially if we manage to hit the sun from the right angle.

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

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

The academic archaeology establishment is suppressing my breakthroughs because of the disruption it would bring to their prepared-core flake-based toolmaking industry.