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

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You can either hang out in the Android Loop or the HURD loop.

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.

Facebook defines relationships. 'Yeah, we would have broken up last night, but the net connection was down.'

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

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

Well, for some value of 'actually work'.

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

Oh yeah, I didn't even know they renamed it the Willis Tower in 2009, because I know a normal amount about skyscrapers.

He holds the laptop like that on purpose, to make you cringe.

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.

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

An old astronomer trick for distinguishing the Sun from other stars is to take multiple photos a few minutes apart and overlay them, making the Sun stand out due to its high proper motion.

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

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

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

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

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

Texting should work. Unless the message is too long, in which case it gets converted to voicemails, and I think I'm locked out of my voicemail.

I think Voyager 1 would be just past the event horizon, but slightly less than halfway to the bright ring.

Eventually a UN is set up. And then a lone rebel runs down the line of flags in front of it, runs back to his base, and gets a kajillion points.

Chemistry grad students have been spotted trying to lure campus squirrels into laundry hampers in the hope that it sparks inspiration.

The installation of the pipes on the inside of the insulation can be challenging, especially when the neighbor could come home at any minute.

I'd like to see more damage assessments for hurricanes hitting New York and flooding Manhattan -- something like the 1938 Long Island Express, but aimed a bit more to the west. It's just a matter of time.

Yes, the cosmic microwave background is great, but what about the earthly microwave foreground?

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.

Menu -> Manage -> [Optimize space usage, Encrypt disk usage report, Convert photos to text-only, Delete temporary files, Delete permanent files, Delete all files currently in use, Optimize menu options, Download cloud, Optimize cloud , Upload unused space to cloud]

Serve one each to guests whose last cursed cocktail was more than 2 months ago.

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

Disgusting

Never bring tequila to a key-signing party.

'DISPATCHING DRONE TO TARGET COORDINATES.' 'Wait, crap, wrong button. Oh jeez.'

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

They're robust against quantum attacks because it's hard to make a quantum system that large.

I have never been totally satisfied by the explanations for why e to the ix gives a sinusoidal wave.

I'm not totally locked into my routine—twice a year, I take a break to change the batteries in my smoke detectors.

To prove you're human, please click all the number pairs that appear together in your Social Security number.

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.

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

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.

I understand it's hard to do more than 300 feet on these 90-second rush jobs, but with a smaller ramp I'm worried the gee forces will be too high for me to do any tricks.

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?

If you Huffman-coded all the 'random' things everyone on the internet has said over the years, you'd wind up with, like, 30 or 40 bytes *tops*.

When designing an interface, imagine that your program is all that stands between the user and hot, sweaty, tangled-bedsheets-fingertips-digging-into-the-back sex.

Although ... who else can't wait for them to incorporate that Wiimote head-tracking stuff into games? Man, the future's gonna be *awesome*.

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.

My bold criticism might anger the hot air balloon people, which would be a real concern if any of them lived along a very narrow line directly upwind of me.

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

This rumpled fabric at the corner looks like evidence of ongoing tectonic activity.

Wait, what?

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.

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

For the sake of simplicity, gardeners are assumed to move through Euclidean space--neglecting the distortion from general relativity--unless they are in the vicinity of a Schwarzschild Orchid.

Well, we've really only settled the question of ghosts that emit or reflect visible light. Or move objects around. Or make any kind of sound. But that covers all the ones that appear in Ghostbusters, so I think we're good.

It's important to note that while the effective size of the dog can be arbitrarily large, it's not any more of a good dog than the two original dogs.

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

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

'And hypnotize someone into thinking they've uploaded it and passed it around.' 'But then won't the uploader get suspicious that it pauses at 301+ for a while? Why don't we just forge the number entirel--' ::BLAM:: 'The Council of 299 is adjourned.'

Every weekend I take an ATV out into the desert and spend a day tracing a faint "(C) GOOGLE 2009" watermark across the landscape.

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

Dvorak words may sound hard to pronounce, but studies show they actually put less stress on the vocal cords.

I actually kind of feel like John and Surf King wouldn't like each other, which is a lot to unpack.

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

You'd think the most expensive part would be the quark-gluon plasma chamber, but it's actually usually the tube to the top of the atmosphere to carry the cosmic rays down.

Ontology is way off to the left and geography is way off to the right.

Also known as the Black Mirror-Mythbusters scale.

A big obstacle in experimenting with the mind's dream-simulation-engine is holding onto the details as you wake up. With TCMP you can bring back any information you want.

It's okay, I'm at 10%, so I'm good for another month or two.

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

"You know lightning, right? When electric charge builds up in a cloud and then discharges in a giant spark? Ask me why that happens." "Why does tha--" "No clue. We think it's related to the hair thing."

Psychology researchers say our 'flashbulb' memories of big events can be unreliable, but I clearly remember watching live on CNN as Challenger crashed into and destroyed the Berlin Wall.

I need an extension for my research project because I spent all month trying to figure out whether learning Dvorak would help me type it faster.

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

The mainstream dogma sparked a wave of dogmatic revisionism, and this revisionist mainstream dogmatism has now given way to a more rematic mainvisionist dogstream.

Although grad students, suddenly reminded that food exists, tend to just grab and devour both without further discussion.

'Don't worry, I can do it in under a minute.' 'Yes, I've noticed.'

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

The increasing number of graham crackers and chocolate bars in orbit has created a growing risk of Kessler s'mores.

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

It's time to draw the line.

In a way, all vultures are Time Vultures; some just have more patience than others.

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

My biology grad student friends tell me that different types of alcohol don't actually have different effects. I trust their expertise, not because of the 'biology' part, but because of the 'grad student'.

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

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

I wonder what the trendy adults in 2019 who are too cool for Pokemon will be into. Probably Digimon!

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

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

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

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

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

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!

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

Was this your car? [looping 'image loading' animation]

It's so sad how almost no one alive today can remember seeing the galactic rainbow, the insanity nebula, or the skull and glowing eyes of the Destroyer of Sagittarius.

With a space elevator, a backyard full of solar panels could launch about 500 horses per year, and a large power plant could launch 10 horses per minute.

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

If you call my regular number, it just goes to my pager.

I keep first aid kits in those emergency lockers. Sure, it's expensive to have them installed in the wall, but at least for those ones there's no need to pay extra for safety glass.

Slowly progressing from 'how do protons behave in relativistic collisions?' to 'what the heck are protons even doing when they're just sitting there?'

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

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

YEEEEEEAAAAAAHHHHHH!

I just noticed CVS has started stocking homeopathic pills on the same shelves with--and labeled similarly to--their actual medicine. Telling someone who trusts you that you're giving them medicine, when you know you’re not, because you want their money, isn’t just lying--it’s like an example you’d make up if you had to illustrate for a child why lying is wrong.

If I get a Wii, it will be the first game console I've owned.

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

Time to paint another grammarian silhouette on the side of the desktop.

If we can destroy enough of the lights in our region, we may see more comets, but that's a risk we'll have to take.

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.

I just want to give him a hug or something.

The investor elevator pitch is "Wheeeeeeee! Elevators are fun!"

"9 out of 10 dentists have banned me from their offices."

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

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!

Opening dialogue by Scott

Remember, models aren't for telling you facts, they're for exploring dynamics. This model apparently explores time travel.

You roll for initiative, and ... [roll] ... wow, do you ever take it.

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.

The sudden introduction of Venusian flowers led to an explosive growth of unusual Earth pollinators, which became known as the "butterfly effect."

Please, we need your help. Our research suggests you're the last living descendant of the person who knew how to format this config file.

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

She's pretty sharp when provoked.

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 ...

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

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

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

I'm only willing to visit placid lakes, salt flats, and painting exhibits until the world's 3D technology improves.

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

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

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

(six hours later) ARGH. How are these stupid microchips so durable?! All I want is to undo a massive industrial process with household tools!

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

No one likes my novelty ringtone, an audio recording of a phone on vibrate sitting on a hard surface.

I was thinking of observing stars to verify Einstein's theory of relativity again, but I gotta say, that thing is looking pretty solid at this point.

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

Remind me to order another pack of coffee filters from Dyson. Man, these things are EXPENSIVE.

Oh, definitely not; they don't have Amazon Prime.

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

Since delays should get less likely closer to the launch, most astronomers in 2018 believed the expansion of the schedule was slowing, but by early 2020 new measurements indicated that it was actually accelerating.

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

If you're 15 or younger, then just remember that it's nevertheless probably too late to be a child prodigy.

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

By clicking anywhere, scrolling, or closing this notification, you agree to be legally bound by the witch Sycorax within a cloven pine.

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

Once again topping the list of tonight's hottest rising stars in Hollywood is ξ Persei!

It's hard living somewhere with antlions, because every time you find one of their traps, you feel compelled to spend all day constructing a tiny model of Jabba's sail barge next to it.

'Pick you up at eight?' 'Nine. I've got to re-mine the driveway.'

I used to do this all the time.

You should start giving out 'E's so I can spell FACADE or DEFACED.

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

It's amazing what it does for YouTube comments.

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

I spent more time trying to get an audible.com audio book playing than it took to listen to the book. I have lost every other piece of DRM-locked music I have paid for.

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

And the heaven departed as a scroll when it is rolled together, but then more heaven kept appearing to replace it, as if the scroll was infinite.

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

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

I think you could get up to about 11:59:57 before you'd have trouble swallowing the chocolates fast enough. At that point, you'd need some kind of a liquify-and-chug apparatus to get up over the 11:59:59 barrier. Anyway, Merry Christmas!

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

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

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

My optimizer uses content-aware inpainting to fill in all the wasted whitespace in the code, repeating the process until it compiles.

I mean, half of these are undefined. And your multiplication dots are too low; they look like decimal points.

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

Parents: talk to your kids about popup blockers. Also, at some point, sex. But crucial fundamentals first!

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

Alternate method: convince them to pretend it's an Etch-a-Sketch and try to erase it.

Excellent recovery: ... which we could try to use to somehow save your original brother!

The phone will be collected by the toll operators and mailed back to you within 4-6 weeks.

"The name wasn't a tip-off?" "Honestly, at first I thought you were saying 'Juneau'. A gravity assist seemed like a weird way to get to Alaska, but I figured it must be more efficient or something."

I'm not sure if this is actually true

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

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

[10 years later] Man, why are people so comfortable handing Google and Facebook control over our nuclear weapons?

Soon, linguists will be wandering around everywhere, saying things like "colorless green ideas sleep furiously" and "more people have been to Russia than I have," and speech will become unintelligible.

Fine, walk away. I'm gonna go cry into a pint of Ben&Jerry's Brownie Batter(tm) ice cream [link], then take out my frustration on a variety of great flash games from PopCap Games(r) [link].

'Thank you for the loveliest evening I've ever had...' [normal] '...east of the Mississippi.' [instant intrigue!]

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

This well-known effect has of course been replicated in countless experiments.

Pool on the roof must've sprung a leak.

It's not as big a loss as it looks, because now I have leftover supplies, which will help me talk myself into doing this all over again with a new project!

The Hammer + Captain Tightpants == Captain Hammerpants?

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

Dear Peter Wiggin: This letter is to inform you that you have received enough upvotes on your reddit comments to become president of the world. Please be at the UN tomorrow at 8:00 sharp.

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

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

Remember, the installer is watching the camera for the checksum it generated, so you have to scan it using your own phone.

Oh, and do you have any tips on how to vacuum up copper that's melted into your carpet?

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

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

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

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

Spacetime Soccer, known outside the United States as '4D Football' is a now-defunct sport. Infamous for referee decisions hinging on inconsistent definitions of simultaneity, it is also known for the disappearance of many top players during... [more]

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

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

It was tricky.

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

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.

They say it's probably safe to keep orbiting for a while, but if it stays on or starts flashing we might have to call someone.

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

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

[proudly greeting the hotel manager at the door] "Did I do a good job?"

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

I'm a big fan of Kurt Halsey

My other (much harder) hobby is trying to engineer situations where I have an excuse to use more than one of them in short succession.

We will have an entire wing of the library devoted to copies of book #26, because ohmygod it's the one where Jake and Cassie finally KISS!!!

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

This is true. The lyrics are ridiculous.

To get more knowledge

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

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

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

It looks good, but it needs more postfixins.

In the off-seasons, I hire an animal trainer to help confront secret agents with situations which they are unable to report by radio.

I don't know about houseflies, but we definitely caught a lot of fruit flies with our vinegar bowl. Hooray science!

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.'

What's the complexity class of the best linear programming cutting-plane techniques? I couldn't find it anywhere. Man, the Garfield guy doesn't have these problems ...

The rope keeps breaking, I'm covered in bruises and scrapes, and I've barely reached the end of my driveway, but I don't care--I'm determined to become the first person to commute to work by tetherball.

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

Our brains have just one scale, and we resize our experiences to fit.

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

Hey, so did you ever finish your video series about Cassie and the caterpillar morph? I loved the first three, but never ... no, sorry, I get it, this isn't the place. Sorry! Sorry.

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

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

A century later, the harrowing flight of the survivors from Oregon was dramatized in a popular video game.

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

"Want to feel old?" "Yes."

Haha, you'll see!

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

Billy Joel briefly detained

Having a positive attitude is almost tautologically good for your mental health, and extreme stress can hurt your immune system, but that doesn't mean you should feel like shit for feeling like shit.

Can you stop glaring at me like that? It makes me feel really ironic.

Squaring the circle is really easy with some good clamps.

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

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?

When an Ur guy / sells Nanni things / but the copper's bad, / He simply records his complaint for all time / "I got a bad deal / I'm maaaaad"

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

Using a ring to bind someone you covet into your dark and twisted world? Wow, just got the subtext there. Also, the apparently eager Beyoncé would've made one badass Nazgȗl.

The package weighs 7 kg 9 oz.

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

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

After a lot of analysis, I've determined that they're actually big red dots; they're just very far away.

That helmet won't save him.

Using diacritics correctly is not my forté.

I love the idea here, though of course it's not a great-quality drawing or scan.

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

This is a fun explanation to prepare your kids for; it's common and totally wrong. Good lines include 'why does the air have to travel on both sides at the same time?' and 'I saw the Wright brothers plane and those wings were curved the same on the top and bottom!'

This is silly, of course. The enemy will be born in the network.

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

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

Or love in general, for that matter. It just leads to the idea that either your love is pure, perfect, and eternal, and you are storybook-compatible in every way with no problems, or you're LYING when you say 'I love you'.

If you can't get your graphing tool to do the shading, just add some clip art of cosmologists discussing the unusual curvature of space in the area.

"TURN OFF THE LASER GUIDE STAR" "WHY" "STAR CATS"

The presents under the tree are actually a single gift connected by an underground ribbon system.

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

Arboretum Owner Denied Standing in Garden Path Suit on Grounds Grounds Appealing Appealing

It's basically Pascal's Wager for the paranoid prankster.

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.

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

"Friction-driven static electrification is familiar and fundamental in daily life, industry, and technology, but its basics have long been unknown and have continually perplexed scientists from ancient Greece to the high-tech era. [...] To date, no single theory can satisfactorily explain this mysterious but fundamental phenomenon." --Eui-Cheol Shin et. al. (2022)

I see white shores, and beyond it, a far green country under a tequila sunrise.

Sure, T. rex is closer in height to Stegosaurus than a sparrow. But that doesn't tell you much; 'Dinosaur Comics' author Ryan North is closer in height to certain dinosaurs than to the average human.

Plus, the photo was geotagged, my unlocked password manager was visible on the laptop, AND you could see my naked reflection in the dark part of the screen.

'Detector! What would the Bayesian statistician say if I asked him whether the--' [roll] 'I AM A NEUTRINO DETECTOR, NOT A LABYRINTH GUARD. SERIOUSLY, DID YOUR BRAIN FALL OUT?' [roll] '... yes.'

A tattoo of a tattoo parlor receipt

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

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

'Wait, our state has mail voting. The forms are literally on the kitchen table.' 'Not now, I'm busy researching which channels have sharks in them.'

Even if a planet is lucky enough to have a stable orbit that weaves between the spikes, the seasons get weird whenever it passes close to them.

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

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

The use of the 'Garfield' character for the purposes of this parody qualifies as fair use under the Copyright Act of 1976, 17 U.S.C. sec. 107. See Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music (92-1292), 510 U.S. 569

Astrobiology is held back by the fact that we're all too nervous to try to balance on the ladder while holding an expensive microscope.

If our current civilization lasts another 8,000 years, it's probably fair to assume the Long Now Foundation got things right, and at some point we started listening to them and switched to five-digit years.

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

Coconuts are so far down to the left they couldn't be fit on the chart. Ever spent half an hour trying to open a coconut with a rock? Fuck coconuts.

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

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

<A>: Like </a>this.

I'm excited about the proposal to add a "brontosaurus" emoji codepoint because it has the potential to bring together a half-dozen different groups of pedantic people into a single glorious internet argument.

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

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

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

HISTORIANS: We've decided to trim the past down to make things more manageable. Using BCE/CE, would you rather we lose the odd-numbered or even-numbered years?

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

Fun fact: The standard North American NAD83 coordinate system is misaligned from the actual Earth, off-center by about 7 feet. Someone knows where I am, and I'm in the wrong place.

Amazon.com took a surprise early lead with 'Time required to transport a package from Iquitos, Peru to Manaus, Brazil' but then lost it at 'Minutes to skeletonize a cow'.

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

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

Update: It turns out the cannon has a motorized base, and can make holes just fine using the barrel itself as a battering ram. But due to design constraints it won't work without a projectile loaded in, so we still need those drills.

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

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

[five years later] Ok, it seems we were accidentally zoomed in slightly too far. But imagine there's a cool-looking twisted accretion disc just outside this black square!

"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."

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

The worst is when you run out of monospaced fonts and have to use variable-width variables.

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

For all we know, the odds are in our favor.

Once you see it, you can't help seeing it every time. Until your body finishes metabolizing the mushrooms.

There are lots of very smart people doing fascinating work on cryptographic voting protocols. We should be funding and encouraging them, and doing all our elections with paper ballots until everyone currently working in that field has retired.

'I was pretty good at skeet shooting, but was eventually kicked off the range for catching the clay pigeons in a net and dispatching them execution-style.'

[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.'

Prank #11: Boston

You absolute-fucking-... shit.

I still wish it were true.

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

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

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

cerebrospinal fluid, pericardial fluid, sputum, aqueous humor, perilymph, chyme, hydatid fluid, interstitial fluid, rheum, and gin.

NO DRAMA ZONE -> If I've made you sad, you'd better not tell me, because I am TERRIFIED of that situation and have NO IDEA how to handle it.

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

Sounds fine. I looked up the Academy, and it says on their MySpace page that their journal is peer-viewed and downloaded biannually.

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

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

It also helps with negotiation. "Look, if it were up to me, *I'd* accept your offer, but my swarm of autonomous killer cells literally can't be reasoned with. It's out of my hands!"

And the ten minutes striking up a conversation with that strange kid in homeroom sometimes matters more than every other part of high school combined.

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."

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

It's not hard when you have the same thought like 40 or 50 percent of the time.

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

I wrote 20 short programs in Python yesterday. It was wonderful. Perl, I'm leaving you.

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

I like to think that somewhere out there, there's someone whose personal quest is lobbying TV providers to add an option to switch their on-screen keyboards to Dvorak.

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

Arguably, the '1/2' in the drag equation is purely decorative, since drag coefficients are already unitless and could just as easily be half as big. Some derivations give more justification for the extra 1/2 than others, but one textbook just calls it 'a traditional tribute to Euler and Bernoulli.'

I love the title-text!

Due to a typo, I initially found a forum for serious Fleshlight enthusiasts, and it turns out their highest-end models are ALSO capable of setting trees on fire. They're impossible to use without severe burns, but some of them swear it's worth it.

Although I hear they were caught cheating off of Rosalind, who sat at a desk in front of them.

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

In contrast to the deep booming sound associated with the cannon in pop culture depictions, recent studies show it actually made more of a 'toot toot!' noise.

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

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.

We'll turn the asteroid belt into ball bearings to go between different rings orbiting at different speeds.

You may point out that this very retreat into ironic detachment while still clearly participating in the thing in question is the very definition of contemporary hipsterdom. But on the other hand, wait, you're in an empty room. Who are you talking to?

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

I'm normally a pretty frugal person, but I still compulsively buy any R/C aircraft that's less than $30. In the last few years, this has become a problem.

According to these blood tests, you're like 30% cereal.

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

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

Gödel should do an article on which branches of math have the lowest average theorem number.

'Well, no further questions. You're hired!' 'Oh, sorry! I'm no longer interested. There's a bunch of future I gotta go check out!'

[later] I can't believe how bad corruption has become, especially given that our league split off from the statewide one a month ago SPECIFICALLY to protest this kind of flagrantly biased judging.

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

They are six-legged spiders

They could afford to cut it close because they all had Global Entry.

The real loser in an argument about the meaning of the word 'hoverboard' is anyone who leaves that argument on foot.

Ok, plan B: Fly a kite into the blades, with a rock in a sling dangling below it, and create the world's largest trebuchet.

There's no group chat member more enigmatic than the cool person who you all assume has the chat on mute, but who then instantly chimes in with no delay the moment something relevant to them is mentioned.

Also, we would really appreciate it if you could prominently refer to it as an 'eHit'.

The other two are still lost on the infinite plane of uniform density.

I call Rule 34 on Wolfram's Rule 34.

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.

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

But the past was much too cramped!

And watch out for that guy from comic #53.

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

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

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

One perk of being born at 0.88c is that your birthday is over two days long.

For decades I've been working off the accumulated rotation from one long afternoon on a merry-go-round when I was eight.

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

Electric skateboards, by cost, get the equivalent of about 300 miles per gallon. Lithium batteries just need to get cheaper.

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

If used with software that could keep up, a scroll wheel mapped to send a stream of 'undo' and 'redo' events could be kind of cool.

People may complain about readability, but even with jpeg compression, extracting the data points is usually computationally feasible if there aren't too many of them.

The phantom found Edward Everett Hale a century too early; by the time we invented satellites, the specifics of his 'brick moon' proposal were dismissed as science fiction.

[bzzzt] "REMEMBER TO CHECK IN FOR YOUR FLIGHT TO LONDON." "My wha-" [bzzzt] "YOUR UBER WILL ARRIVE IN FOUR MINUTES."

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

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

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

Paleontologists have long worried that the dinosaurs blasted into space 66 million years ago will one day complete their orbits and fall back down.

And then do it again in a moment now that they're out of Star Power

Who can forget the early 2010s memes? 'You know you're a 90s kid if you remember the feeling of warm sunlight on your face.' 'Only 90s kids remember the dawn.'

I am firmly of the opinion that if something doesn't have a year on it, every time the expiration date rolls around it is good again for the two weeks preceding that date.

You can also try 'Yikes.'

I didn't understand what you meant. I still don't. But I'll figure it out soon!

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

In competition, you can only play a name if you know who the person is. No fair saying "Frank ... Johnson. That sounds like a real person! Let me just Google him real quick."

Your problem is so terrible, I worry that, if I help you, I risk drawing the attention of whatever god of technology inflicted it on you.

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

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

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

I don't know what's more telling--the number of pages in the Wikipedia talk page argument over whether the 1/87.0857143 scale is called "HO" or "H0", or the fact that within minutes of first hearing of it I had developed an extremely strong opinion on the issue.

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

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

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

Protip: Annoy Ray Kurzweil by always referring to it as the 'Cybersingularity'.

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

"Ok, I lit the smoke bomb and rolled it under the bed. Let's see if it--" ::FWOOOSH:: "Politifact says: PANTS ON FIRE!"

90% of the iceberg is hidden beneath the water, but that 90% only uses 10% of its brain, so it's really only 9%.

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

v3.0.2: Hey, if anyone still using this app is headed to the beach, can you stop at 4th and River St and grab the sunscreen from my car? Trunk should be unlocked. Thanks!

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!

The BBC lead was 'The elusive erogenous zone said to exist in some women may be a myth, say researchers who have hunted for it.' I couldn't read it with a straight face.

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.

If you see two numbers but they're both the same and you have to squint to read them, you have synesthesia, colorblindness, diplopia, and myopia.

Do I just leave money in my mailbox? How much? How much money do they need, anyway? I guess it probably depends how the economy is doing. If stocks go up, should I leave more money in my mailbox or less?

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

Science joke. You should probably just move along.

Moments later, the White Witch rolls up and, confused, tries to tempt the probe with a firmware upgrade.

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