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

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

Some people haven't heard of the Donner Party. They were pioneers who got stranded and likely resorted to cannibalism.

'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.

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

Listen, they request that you stop submitting a listing for your house labeled 'WHERE YOU BROKE MY HEART'.

Real-life prospective-pairing curves over things like age can get depressing.

The social media reaction to this asteroid announcement has been sharply negative. Care to respond?

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

The Earth's magnetic field is primarily generated by currents in the liquid outer core, though some geophysicists argue that an unexplained mismatch with models suggests that the Kinder toy contains a magnet.

The Watership Down rabbits removed an additional 0.1 nanometers constructing their warren, although that was mostly soil. British rabbits have historically mined very little coal; the sole rabbit-run coal plant was shut down in the 1990s.

"Oh my God, why did you scotch-tape a bunch of hammers together?" "It's ok! Nothing depends on this wall being destroyed efficiently."

I haven't had the patience for RPGs in a long time.

I'm always so happy that I successfully navigated the introduction that I completely forget to pay attention to the name the other person told me.

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

I understand modern autogyros are much more stable, so I've probably angered the autogyro people by impugning their safety. Once they finish building the autogyros they've been working on in their garages for 10 years, they'll come after me.

Police reported three dozen cheerful bystanders, yet no one claims to have seen who did it.

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

"I think I'll pass. These days I have a hard time feeling comfortable in crowded bars with loud music and lots of shouting." --me, after the pandemic, but now for a second reason

According to Google, "the time for Beeland" is apparently whenever you're looking for delicious honey in Spillimacheen, British Columbia or a hexagonal chalet in the Savinja valley in Slovenia.

No two adjacent circles are the same color.

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

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

"Wait, we've MOVED since 2010. How on Earth did--" "Look, some of us were just born to be champions."

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

There's this idea that emoji are bad for communication because they replace ambiguity and nuance with a limited set of preselected emotions, but it doesn't really survive a collision with real-world usage of the thinking face or upside-down smiley.

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

Einstein was WRONG when he said that provisional patent #39561 represented a novel gravel-sorting technique and should be approved by the Patent Office.

I was just disassembling it over the course of five hours so it would fit in the trash more efficiently.

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?'

The cycle seems to be 'we need these symbols to clarify what types of things we're referring to!' followed by 'wait, it turns out words already do that.'

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

It's sad seeing those videos of turbine blade being torn apart in high winds, but it's the only way they can disperse their seeds.

The end.

Look, you can't complain about this after giving us so many scenarios involving N locked chests and M unlabeled keys.

Will there ever be a physics term greater than 'tachyonic antitelephone?' According to this message from the future, the answer is 'no.'

DEPARTMENT OF NEUROSCIENCE / Motto: "If I hear the phrase 'mirror neurons' I swear to God I will flip this table."

1,300,000-1,400,000 ft: Ask a crew member to show you how to use the ISS food warmer.

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

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

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

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.

We're right under the flight path for the scheduled orbital launch, but don't worry--it's too cold out for the rockets to operate safely, so I'm sure they'll postpone.

NASCAR removed the passenger seats because drivers hated how astronauts kept riding along with them and loudly announcing "Ahh, what a nice and relaxing drive."

Handy exam trick: when you know the answer but not the correct derivation, derive blindly forward from the givens and backward from the answer, and join the chains once the equations start looking similar. Sometimes the graders don't notice the seam.

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

Ugh, it says they attempted delivery but "Nobody was home."

This scavenger hunt is getting boring. Let's go work on the treehouse!

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

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.

Phil Plait once pointed out that you can calculate the total angular area of the sky this way. If the sky is a sphere with radius 57.3 degrees, then its area is 4*pi*r^2=41,253 square degrees. This makes dimensional analysts SO mad, but you can't argue with results.

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

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

Neal Stephenson thinks it's cute to name his labels 'dengo'

Sn = tin

'Can't you just use the LHC you already built to find it again?' 'We MAY have disassembled it to build a death ray.' 'Just one, though.' 'Nothing you should worry about.' 'The death isn't even very serious.'

Funding was quickly restored to the NHC and the APA was taken back off hurricane forecast duty.

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

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

That night, retired USAF pilots covertly replaced the '62' with '50'.

The key to discovering life on Mars is to find someone who built a camera and landed it on Mars. Then you just look through the pictures for plants and dogs and stuff.

Screw these 36-degree angles. I'm converting to Judaism.

Click and drag.

Charlie actually delivered the Medicare line almost verbatim in the 1971 movie's Fizzy Lifting Drink scene, but it was ultimately cut from the final release.

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

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

Dinosaurs totally jumped the ichthyosaur when they got rid of Brontosaurus.

Of course you get an ice cream cone for the swimmer too! You're not a monster.

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

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

It has been −2,147,483,648 days since our last integer overflow.

I looked up "insanity" in like 10 different dictionaries and none of them said anything like that. Neither did the DSM-4. But I'll keep looking. Maybe it's in the DSM-5!

That's a gneiss butte.

I'm rubber. You're rubber. We contemplate the reality of our existence in mute, vulcanized horror.

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

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

My theory is that most humans have been colonized with alien mind-control slugs that hold the earbuds for them, and the ones who can't wear earbuds are the only surviving free ones.

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.

You want me to pick up waffle cones? Oh, right, for the wine. One sec, let me just derive your son's credit card number and I'll be on my way.

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

'They really shouldn't let those small cars drive in traffic. I worry I'm going to kill someone if I hit one! They should have to drive on the sidewalk, safely out of the way.'

Hey, why do YOU get to be the president of Tautology Clu-- wait, I can guess.

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

Oh, what a pity, can't you understand . . .

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

Did he just go crazy and jump out the window?

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

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

What if someone broke out of a hypothetical situation in your room right now?

Dear Reader: Enclosed is a check for ninety-eight cents. Using your work, I have proven that this equals the amount you requested.

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

The heartfelt tune it plays is CC licensed, and you can get it from my seed on JoinDiaspora.com whenever that project gets going.

They estimate the rocket should be free by approximately ... uh ... well, in about two hours.

We never see any time travelers because they all discover it's a huge mistake. This is also why your friend at the lab suddenly looked about a year older recently.

It's important to learn the moves that take you into the vortex, but it's best not to study vortex itself too closely. Even grandmasters who have built up a tolerance lose the ability to play for a few hours after studying it.

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!

Later: 'Why is there a book hovering over the trash can?'

It gets worse! You know that wizened old monk with the gypsy wife whose voodoo shop we smash up every day after school?

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

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

Platonic solids for my real friends and real solids for my platonic friends!

Oh, because Facebook has worked out SO WELL for everyone.

Man, there's future *everywhere*.

Man, this trick has saved me so many times.

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

Scientists occasionally invent alternative periodic table layouts, which is usually a sign that they don't have enough enrichment in their enclosures.

That helmet won't save him.

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

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

Extremely rude how Turing's later formulations of the halting problem called me out by name specifically.

Merge branch 'asdfasjkfdlas/alkdjf' into sdkjfls-final

Maybe you should wear one too? I guess I'm taller than you, so as long as I have one we're fine.

It's definitely an intentional foul, but we've decided it's worth it.

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

PYTHON FLAG ENABLE THREE LAWS

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.

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

Are you ok? Do you need help?

Perhaps you need a crash course in taking hints. Here's your first lesson: We're not actually walking somewhere together; I'm trying to leave this conversation and you're following me.

Astronomers are a little unsure of the applicability of this index, but NASA's Planetary Protection Officer is all in favor.

It's like a half-solved cryptogram where the solution is a piece of FORTH code written by someone who doesn't know FORTH.

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

The chemistry experiment had me figuratively -- and then shortly thereafter literally -- glued to my seat.

If only my ancestors had been fortunate enough to marry into the branch of the bacteria family that could photosynthesize, like all my little green cousins here.

It's commonly believed that Lorentz contraction makes objects appear flatter along the direction of travel. However, this ignores light travel times. In fact, a fast-moving butt would appear rotated toward the observer but not substantially distorted. Shakira was right.

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

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.

If you get an 11/100 on a CS test, but you claim it should be counted as a 'C', they'll probably decide you deserve the upgrade.

Although really, the damage was done when the party planners took the hole punch to the elevator ribbon to hang up the sign.

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

POLITIFACT SAYS: MOSTLY WHATEVER

Asimov's Cosmic AC was created by linking all datacenters through hyperspace, which explains a lot. It didn't reverse entropy--it just discarded the universe when it reached end-of-life and ordered a new one.

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

CONFLICT OF INTEREST STATEMENT: The authors hope these results are correct because we all want to be cool people who are good at science.

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

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

'Dude, why can't you just be a normal roommate?' 'Because I'm coming TOWARD you!'

Dot Tumblr Dot Com, on the other hand, would be an awful name for a band, if only because of how hard it would be to direct people to your band's website.

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

Oh sure, I know Keira Knightly, from the first movie in that series by The Land Before Time producer. You know, the franchise with the guy from Jurassic Park and Ghostwriter, and script work by Billie Lourd's mom?

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

NOTE TO FUTURE ETYMONLINGUISTS: Our best guess is that 'blimp' is onomatopoeia. The 'B-Limp' thing is a folk etymology.

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

That guy only drives an alkaline car to overcompensate for his highly acidic penis.

It's my most ambitious project yet, judging by the amount of guacamole.

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

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

Old people used to write obnoxious thinkpieces about how people these days always wear watches and are slaves to the clock, but now they've switched to writing thinkpieces about how kids these days don't appreciate the benefits of an old-fashioned watch. My position is: The word 'thinkpiece' sounds like a word made up by someone who didn't know about the word 'brain'.

Not pictured: the elongated Halley's-Comet-like orbit of every Rebecca Black lyric.

Dr. Fauci is not permitted to have a cat, because as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, his petting one would be considered giving aid and comfort to an allergen.

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

In months other than September, the 11th is mentioned substantially less often than any other date. It's been that way since long before 9/11 and I have no idea why.

Take me down to the paradise municipality / where the grass is mauve and the girls aren't fromthisreality.

Someday ImageMagick will finally break for good and we'll have a long period of scrambling as we try to reassemble civilization from the rubble.

If you're lying in bed tonight and you see yellow eyes glinting in your window, are you being stalked by a puma, a mountain lion, a panther, a catamount, or a cougar? Trick question--in North America, they're all names for the same species, Puma concolor! Isn't learning fun? Anyway, sleep tight!

We should really start calculating it earlier, but until the end of December we're always too busy trying to figure out which day Christmas will fall on.

Tau Ceti is farther away, so it took me 36 years to start the war over updog.

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

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

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

Later, when I remember that I'm calling movers, I frantically scribble over the labels and write 'NORMAL HOUSE STUFF' on all of them, which actually makes things worse.

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

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

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

Reportedly, double-walled inflatable balls like this exist somewhere. Now to find that place.

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

[Six months later] "Well, our 'worst ladder' subscription series was a surprisingly lucrative success, but was completely canceled out by the losses from the disastrous Home Depot merchandising tie-in."

Update: The physics department has recruited an astronomer who studies meteor fireballs.

The most important attributes of a vector in 3-space are {Location, Location, Location}

During the day it also activates for neat clouds and pretty sunsets.

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.

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.

Could be worse. The last guy in that situation fell for one of the transient trumpeting angels.

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

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

I love how Google handles dimensional analysis. Stats are ballpark and vary wildly by time of day and whether your mom is in town.

The package weighs 7 kg 9 oz.

After changing it back and forth several times and consulting with internet linguist Gretchen McCulloch, I settled on "ok" in my book How To, but I'm still on the fence. Maybe I should just switch to "oK."

1. Flatten the curve. 2. Steepen the curve. 3. Hang out.

Yes, there are a lot of longing looks across the bridge of Galactica first, but that's beside the point!

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.

Excited to vote for future presidents Bill Eisenhamper, Amy Forb, Ethan Obample, and Abigail Washingtoast.

I still think the Cold Stone Creamery partnership was a good idea, but I should have asked before doing the first market trials during the cryogenic mirror tests.

They just want researchers in the enclosure to feel enriched and stimulated. ('The Enclosure' is what archivists call the shadowy world outside their archives in which so many people are trapped.)

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

Every age: "I'm glad I'm not the clueless person I was five years ago, but now I don't want to get any older."

I don't want to talk about it

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

NOW INVENT AN IMPOSSIBLE-TO-TRANSLATE LANGUAGE AND USE IT TO TELL US WHERE THE MONEY IS.

James suggested this, and I have to agree. It'd be much worse.

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

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

[As security is dragging me away] "Come on, at least I didn't make the mistake in the other direction!"

And yet I have no trouble believing that the start of the 2016 election was several decades ago.

Scientists are also sexy, let's not forget that.

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?

Snowy blizzards are fun, but so are warm sunny beaches, so we split the difference by having lots of icy wet slush!

Lambda calculus? More like SHAMbda calculus, amirite?

You might think most people you know are reliable voters, or that your nudge won't convince them, and you will usually be right. But some small but significant percentage of the time, you'll be wrong, and that's why this works.

Welcome to Wyoming, motto "We'd like to clarify that Cheyenne Mountain is in Colorado."

For some reason the water in my pool is green and there's a weird film on the surface #nofilter

If I'm not going to upgrade to a powered one, I should at LEAST stop leaving the door open so often.

They left the belt drive in place but switched which wheel was powered, so people could choose between a regular ride, a long ride, and a REALLY long ride.

It may remain in equilibrium for some time, slowly growing, and then suddenly become significantly redder.

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

How do I work it? IT'S ALREADY WORKING!

The heroes seem to be gaining the upper hand until Darth Juul manages to flip the switch on the car wash control panel from 'REGULAR' to 'PREMIUM.'

FOR AN INTRIGUING TIME CALL

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

Squaring the circle is really easy with some good clamps.

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

According to the cable company reps who keep calling me, it's because I haven't upgraded to the XTREME GIGABAND PANAMAX FLAVOR-BLASTED PRO PACKAGE WITH HBO, which is only $5 more per month for the first 6 months and five billion dollars per month after that.

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.

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

I call Rule 34 on Wolfram's Rule 34.

Dad, where is Grandpa right now?

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

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

The rest is fear of raptors.

Hang on, we got a call from the feds. They say we can do whatever with him, but the EPA doesn't want that laptop in the ocean. They're sending a team.

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

Let me look away and type 'guy who's just jealous that I beat all his MarioKart times' and turn back, and ... yup, there you are again!

For the first time ever, the phrase 'I'd like to thank everyone at 4chan for making me successful and happy' is uttered.

Despite it being imaginary, I already have SUCH a strong opinion on the cord-switch firing incident.

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

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

It IS about physics. It ALL is.

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

According to my especially unsupervised K-means clustering algorithm, there are currently about 8 billion types of people in the world.

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

We were going to try swordfighting, but all my compiling is on hold.

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.

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

Later, at home: 'Dear diary: Still can't figure out what to write here ...'

The debate over the correct Messier number for the Ship of Theseus is ongoing.

All we have are these stupid tantalizing zircons and the scars on the face of the Moon.

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.)

The ten-way tie was judged a ten-way tie, so no one won the grand prize, a rare fishing monopole.

It's definitely not the time to try drinking beer before liquor.

The 6 Weirdest Objects The Buzzfeed Writers Are Throwing Out Their Windows At Us

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

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

I hear Steven Levitt is writing a book analyzing A.J. Jacobs' quest to spend a year reading everything Malcolm Gladwell ever wrote. The audiobook will be narrated by Robert Krulwich of Radiolab.

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

The 538TR attempts to capture a player's combined skill at basketball (either real-life or NBA 2K18) and election forecasting.

Best trivia I learned while working on this: 'Man, Farmville is so huge! Do you realize it's the second-biggest browser-based social-networking-centered farming game in the WORLD?' Then you wait for the listener to do a double-take.

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

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

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

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

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.

It's amazing what it does for YouTube comments.

"Seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, twenty--" / "Can't we just read Pat the Bunny?"

Wait, this is space -- how are you talking to me? And, as an afterthought, what's up with the hole in reality?

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

Or maybe the slide is like Aslan, and gets taller as I do (except without the feeling of discomfort when I reach my teens and suddenly get the Christ stuff.)

The contagious period ends right around when you start to sound sick over the phone, which is probably evidence of cold viruses evolving to spread optimally in the workplace.

58% of the state has gone into plaid.

They'll pick music and culture that they know annoys you. Building in behavioral easter eggs is a fair retaliation!

[Below] On this site on May 12th, 2023, I finally learned how to use the masonry bit for my drill.

Now, you may argue that the varying hour lengths and feedback effects would cause chaos. To which I say, yeah, and I'm also curious to see how the weekday cycle interacts with it! So, you in?

"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

2040s: RNA formed the basis for life each of the five known times it arose on the early Earth.

'Taft in a wet t-shirt contest' is the key image here.

Making out with yourself: now an official xkcd theme? Troubling.

You know what they say: mRNA-1273 before tozinameran, you'll have to slay a banshee in a catamaran.

Increasing-precision timestamps are the Jaws theme of incident reports.

Bonus points if you can identify the science in question

I'm glad to hear they're finally redefining the meter to be exactly three feet.

Their 'best philosophy of epistemology' picks are great, but you can tell they're struggling a little in the 'why you should trust us' section.

I didn't even know I *had* the Monty Python 'Lumberjack' song.

'No, my cabbage moths have already started laying eggs in them! Send the trolley into the river!' 'No, the sailing wolf will steal the boat to rescue them!'

When comparing hypotheses with Bayesian methods, the similar 'clickbayes factor' can account for some harder-to-quantify priors.

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.

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

No white guy who's been mentioned on Twitter has gone on to win.

The two best reasons to get into fossils are booping trilobites and getting to say the word "fossiliferous" a lot.

Protip: Even without the red spiders, never have that conversation halfway through a balloon ride.

[exclamation about how cute your cat is] -> [last 4 digits of your cat's chip ID] -> [your cat's full chip ID] -> [a drawing of your cat] -> [photo of your cat] -> [clone of your cat] -> [your actual cat] -> [my better cat]

Sometimes the best fun looks like boredom.

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

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

'Cheater!' 'Hey, gaming on wifi? You have only yourself to blame.'

Hit Turing right in the test-ees.

OpenStreetMap was always pretty good but is also now *really* good? And Apple Maps's new zoomed-in design in certain cities like NYC and London is just gorgeous. It's cool how there are all these good maps now!

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

The 8th panel is my favorite

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

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

There's also a proof without content of a conjecture without content, but it's left as an exercise for the reader.

Day six: 'The hell? Who mails a bobcat?'

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."

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

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

Merlin really shouldn't leave his dirt bike lying around.

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

Plus, when someone finally grabs your glasses and stomps on them, it costs way less than $1,500 to replace them.

'Guys? The Town is supposed to be good, and I thou--' 'PHYSICIST STEPHEN HAWKING DECLARES NEW FILM BEST IN ALL SPACE AND TIME' 'No, I just heard that--' 'SHOULD SCIENCE PLAY A ROLE IN JUDGING BEN AFFLECK?' 'I don't think--' 'WHAT ABOUT MATT DAMON?'

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

Copy of Copy of Copy of Copy of Copy of Copy of Copy of Copy of Copy of Copy of Copy of Copy of Copy of Copy of Copy of Copy of Copy of Copy of Copy of Copy of Copy of Copy of Copy of Copy of Copy of Copy of Copy of Copy of Copy of Copy of Copy of Copy of Copy of Untitled.doc

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

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

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

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.

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.

Also possibly several miles beyond that.

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

In addition to 'squishy', after reviewing my submitted intraplate ground motion data, the National Geodetic Survey has politely asked me to stop using the word 'supple' so often when describing Midwestern states.

It me, your father.

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.

Also, we have a fort out in the woods where we stashed that hooker's body.

It does come at the small cost of a LOT more off-by-40-or-50 errors.

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

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

It's cool, it's totally ethical--they're all programmed to hunt whichever bird of prey is most numerous at the moment, so they leave the endangered ones alone until near the end.

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

To be fair, my job at NASA was working on robots and didn't actually involve any orbital mechanics. The small positive slope over that period is because it turns out that if you hang around at NASA, you get in a lot of conversations about space.

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

Better change the URL to 'https' before downloading.

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

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

Force-choking the chicken.

At least they're not alone down there.

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

You may point out that strictly speaking, you can use that statement to prove that all risks are tiny--to which I reply HOLY SHIT WATCH OUT FOR THAT DOG!

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.

Saturday is game night.

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.

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

Interestingly, on a true vertical log plot, I think the Eiffel Tower's sides really would be straight lines.

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

It's like one teraspoon / when all you need is a kilonife

The Range Mischief Officer has modified the trajectory to add a single random spin somewhere in the flight, but won't tell us where.

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

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

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

"Sorry, doctor, I'm going to have to come in on a different day--I have another appointment that would be really hard to move, in terms of the kinetic energy requirements."

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

Officer suspended from horse.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

They laugh now, but within 10 years the city's entire criminal class will have quit to work on space research.

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

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

Maybe encouraging the publication of null results isn't enough--maybe we need a journal devoted to publishing results the study authors find personally annoying.

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

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

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

In Connor's second thesis it is stated 'There is no fate but what we make for ourselves.' Does the routine destroy our creativity or do we lose creativity and fall into the routine? Anyway, who's up for a road trip!

Since we haven't really settled on a name for those online hangout/work spaces that try to recreate the experience of cafes, and I love confusion, I'm going to start calling them 'cyber cafes' or 'internet cafes.'

But the windows! What if there's a voyeur watchi-- wait, now I'm turned on too.

Trains rotate the Earth around various axes while elevators shift its position in space.

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

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

I was, at least at the start of this disastrous game night, your friend.

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

It all came flat-packed in Pandora's Box.

$GENERAL JAN DODONNA: An analysis of the plans provided by Princess Leia has reinvigorated the arguments of the 'artificial moonlet' and 'rogue planet-station' camps. I fear this question is fracturing the Rebellion.$

Cloud computing has a ways to go.

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

Below the Web, and the Dark Web, a shadowy parallel world of Cybiko users trade messages on the Translucent Neon Plastic Web.

Other high scorers are melt-in-your-hand aluminum-destroying gallium and tritium-powered glowsticks. Lawn darts are toward the other end.

Sorry to make you memorize this random string of digits. If it helps, it can also double as a mnemonic for remembering your young relatives' birthdays, if they happened to have been born on February 5th, 2018.

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

I hear many of you finally have smooth Flash support, but me and my Intel card are still waiting on a kernel patch somewhere in the pipeline before we can watch Jon Stewart smoothly.

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

Also, all financial analysis. And, more directly, D&D.

I just think lane markers should follow the local magnetic declination.

Oh dang, you have to pay? Hey, has anyone else paid already? If so, can I borrow your phone for a sec?

One good trick, if you get called on a fake service, is to build a working version of it and mention it again the next week.

[Shortly thereafter, at a nearby bakery] ::CRASH:: ::RUMBLE:: ::VRRRRRR:: '... I don't know, officer. It just scooped up an entire rack of scones and drove away!'

Sure, it may not meet science fair standards, but I want credit for getting my baking soda and vinegar mountain added to the Decade Volcanoes list.

'But you're using that same tactic to try to feel superior to me, too!' 'Sorry, that accusation expires after one use per conversation.'

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

Friggin' modern tents don't have a single piece of rope.

Some people argue that the tension and compression in the human skeleton is technically tensegrity, but it's missing the defining characteristic: making people say 'wtf, how is that thing floating?' when they see it.

Themistocles said his infant son ruled all Greece -- "Athens rules all Greece; I control Athens; my wife controls me; and my infant son controls her." Thus, nowadays the world is controlled by whoever buys advertising time on Dora the Explorer.

Or if you replace your car, we'll be happy to set it on fire again so you can take another crack at getting that shot.

All services are microservices if you ignore most of their features.

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

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

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

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

'What was the original problem you were trying to fix?' 'Well, I noticed one of the tools I was using had an inefficiency that was wasting my time.'

If you identified with the kids from The Breakfast Club when it came out, you're now much closer to the age of Principal Vernon.

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

Someday I just know I'm going to encounter a problem that requires 500 flashlights and 700 knives with weird holes in them, and on that day I won't be caught unprepared.

You can identify them ahead-of-time -- they lead with their left foot when the music starts.