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

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According to River, 'adequate' vacuuming systems drain the human body at about half a liter per second.

I always have to turn off nature documentaries when they show these scenes.

I never trust anyone who's more excited about success than about doing the thing they want to be successful at.

Why did the chicken cross the road? It begins over five thousand years ago with the domestication of the red junglefowl in southeast Asia and the development of paved roads in the Sumerian city of Ur.

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

I would describe my personal alignment as "lawful heterozygous silty liquid."

CLIMAX is good, but SEXCLIMAX is even better.

I vaguely and irrationally resent how useful WebPlotDigitizer is.

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

I'm not sure if you can get Epcot, but my friend just got LegoLand. He guessed California but it was the one in Denmark. Meanwhile, I'm rapidly becoming a connoisseur of unmarked dirt roads over flat, barren landscapes.

If any of you want to meet some cool local oxygen atoms, I can introduce you!

Contains 100% of your recommended daily allowance!

Another option: "It is an honor to be the first human to set foot on the moon."

It looks good, but it needs more postfixins.

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

Frazzled scientists are requesting that everyone please stop generating hypotheses for a little bit while they work through the backlog.

To that stranger on the KOOL Tree House chat room, I gotta hand it to you: You were, ultimately, not wrong.

Brains aside, I wonder how many poorly-written xkcd.com-parsing scripts will break on this title (or ;;"''{<<[' this mouseover text."

Hi! Someone call for me? I'm a superhero who specializes in the study of God's creation of Man in the Book of Genesi-- HOLY SHIT A GIANT BUG!

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

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

I found a copy of The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, but the idea of reading it didn't spark joy, so I gave it away.

The best wedge issue is an actual wedge.

Don't click on the wing.

::PLOOOOSH:: Looks like you won't be making it to Vinland today, Leaf Erikson.

I'm actually not sure if Vader and the Emperor count as a household or if Vader lives in that weird black egg thing or what.

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

Manage cookies related to essential site functions, such as keeping Atrus and his sons imprisoned within the page.

Ugh, today's kids are forgetting the old-fashioned art of absentmindedly reading the same half-page of a book over and over and then letting your attention wander and picking up another book.

'So, uh, we did the green study again and got no link. It was probably a--' 'RESEARCH CONFLICTED ON GREEN JELLY BEAN/ACNE LINK; MORE STUDY RECOMMENDED!'

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

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

Though I do think the tiny vent on one of the boosters labeled "O-RING" is in poor taste.

Our sysadmin accidentally won a Nobel Prize while trying to debug neutrino oscillation error correction.

The malaria party was David's idea

Sometimes I'm terrified to realize how many options other people have.

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

They could say "the connection is probably lost," but it's more fun to do naive time-averaging to give you hope that if you wait around for 1,163 hours, it will finally finish.

Sweet unintersecting dreams!

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

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.

The most important quantity for meteorologists is of course the product of latent pressure and temperostrophic enthalpy, though 'how nice the weather is' is a close second.

Somewhere in the world, my actual grandmothers are reading this and angrily exclaiming that I never write even malformed thank-you notes. DEAR GRANDMOMS: I AM SORRY! YOU ARE WONDERFUL PEOPLE AND THANK YOU FOR EVERYTHING. LOVE reddit.com RANDALL.

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

Everyone's caught by surprise when a theory of quantum gravity is developed by a sound technician wearing patent leather shoes while editing Clerks II.

YEEEEEEAAAAAAHHHHHH!

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

Each SCAPDFATIAT point increases the chance that the process will involve the phrase 'by the next business day.'

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

Junior astronomers hate getting put on board update duty, but someone's gotta make sure that stuff is still up there.

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

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.

I don't understand why anyone would pay full price for a flatbed truck rental when you can buy 'DETOUR' signs online for like $10.

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

This works for a surprising range of sunlit things, including rooftops (sure), highway surfaces (probably not), sailboats (maybe), and jets, cars, and wild deer (haha good luck).

I'm like a vampire, except I'm not crossing that threshold even if you invite me.

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!

Two Hedwig references, an obscure Joey Comeau reference, and a girl with a mohawk. Yes.

ISSUE: If we wait long enough, the Earth will eventually be consumed by the Sun. WORKAROUND: None.

Conspiracy theory: There's no such thing as corn. Those fields you see are just the stalks of a fungus that's controlling our brains to make us want to spread it.

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

RIP the surface of Mars

She referenced Billie Eilish, so this must be getting pretty close to the pandemic. But we've seen the last two years in-universe, so if it's set in the future, they must be in at least 2023 by now. [*adds thumbtacks and string to wall*]

There are probably children out there holding down spacebar to stay warm in the winter! YOUR UPDATE MURDERS CHILDREN.

I feel bad for Earth 2 and their shadowflies.

They should add a little sticker that certifies that the humidifier supports water conservation, but in the sense of energy conservation or momentum conservation.

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

The foil on the toothpick represents the blue flash.

Or the pressure at the Earth's core will rise slightly.

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

I've looked at clouds from both sides now.

The month names are the same, except that the fourth month only has the name 'April' in even-numbered years, and is otherwise unnamed.

You can pour a drink into it while hosting a party, although it's a real pain to fit in the dishwasher afterward.

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

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

You're probably thinking, 'has it been a decade?' It's been over thirteen years, buddy.

I lead a small but extraordinarily persuasive religion whose only members are door-to-door proselytizers from other faiths.

The projection for those who think the Mercator projection gives people a distorted idea of how big Greenland is, but a very accurate idea of how big it SHOULD be.

God, she's such a whore.

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

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

We were going to do a falling-apart Rubik's cube that was just 27 independent blocks stuck together with magnets, but then we realized it was actually really cool and even kind of worked, so we cut that one.

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

And on the pedestal these words appear: "And on the pedestal these words appear: "And on the pedestal these words appear: "And ...

Life goal #29 is to get enough of them rejected that I can publish a comparative analysis of the rejection letters.

No two adjacent circles are the same color.

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

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

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

They eventually resolved this self-reference, but Cantor's 'everything-in-the-fetish-book-twice' parties finally sunk the idea.

Conveniently for everyone, it turns out that dark energy is produced by subterranean parasitoid wasps.

I'm teaching every 8-year-old relative to say this, and every 14-year-old to do the same thing with Toy Story. Also, Pokemon hit the US over a decade ago and kids born after Aladdin came out will turn 18 next year.

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)

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

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

'Meet hot young singles in your mom's basement today'? Man, screw you, GeoIP.

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. 🙏🚁🎖️"

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

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

Bonus question: Where is London located? (a) The British Isles (b) Great Britain and Northern Ireland (c) The UK (d) Europe (or 'the EU') (e) Greater London

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

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

Offscreen, bottom left: Whether the custom :coronavirus: Slack react emoji you just added was public domain or whether you should have put a Creative Commons credit somewhere

How could you choose avoiding a little pain over understanding a magic lightning machine?

We're getting a lot of complaints from commuters who were routed onto a coaster, but the theme park patrons who spent hours stuck on an intercity line are also not happy.

I just came from The Martian, and I just have to say: Forget BB-8; I want a pet Sojourner! It's always been the cutest of our Mars rovers.

Mars does get a good score on 'noise levels' and 'scenic views,' but the school district ranking isn't great; the only teacher--the Perseverance rover--is too busy with rock samples to teach more than the occasional weekend class.

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 ...

When Galileo dropped two weights from the Leaning Tower of Pisa, they put him in the history books. But when I do it, I get 'detained by security' for 'injuring several tourists.'

Biologists play reverse Pokémon, trying to avoid putting any one team member on the front lines long enough for the experience to cause evolution.

'Hello, Ghostbusters?' 'ooOOoooo people born years after that movie came out are having a second chiiiild right now ooOoooOoo'

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

Haha, just kidding, everyone's already been hacked. I wonder if today's the day we find out about it.

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

In the aviation world, they don't use AM/PM times. Instead, all times are assumed to be AM unless they're labeled NOTAM.

Welcome to the International Space Station Exclamation Point!

The bunch of disadvantaged kids I was tutoring became too good at writing, and their essays were forcing me to confront painful existential questions, so I started trying to turn them on to drugs and crime instead.

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

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.

"Also, reading 500 coronavirus papers in a row and not sleeping? Probably not great for you either, but I haven't found any studies confirming that yet. I'll keep looking."

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

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

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

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.

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

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

Of the two Garfields, you wouldn't think the cat would turn out to be the more compelling presidential speechwriter, but there you go.

I don't want to talk about it

If a materials scientist gives you a present, always ask whether regifting will incur any requirements for Federal paperwork.

Massage: Theoretical (10), Quantum (6), High-energy (2), Computational (1), Marine (1), Astro- (None)

"You should make it so people can search for and jump into hundreds of conversations at once if they want." "Ooh, good idea! I imagine only the most well-informed people with the most critical information to share will use that feature."

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

On the plus side, she wrote 'Welcome to the AAA Club!' in lipstick on the bathroom mirror, and left me a membership/roadside assistance card on the counter.

If you repeatedly rerun the development of technological civilization, it turns out that for some reason the only constant is that there is always a networking utility called 'netcat', though it does a different thing in each one.

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

Freestyle rapping is basically applied Markov chains.

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

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

The failures usually don't hurt anything, and if it installs several versions, it increases the chance that one of them is right. (Note: The 'yes' command and '2>/dev/null' are recommended additions.)

And that's *another* crypto conference I've been kicked out of. C'mon, it's a great analogy!

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

My life goal is to launch a barge into the air and have it land on one of Elon Musk's rockets.

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

I favor approval voting or IRV chiefly because they mean we might get to bring back The Bull Moose party.

It's 10:34 PM for this user. They really need to get going, they have a thing early tomorrow. Are you sure you want to notify?

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

The distinctive 'UCLA comma' and 'Michigan comma' are a long string of commas at the start and end of the sentence respectively.

The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine or Home Improvement or DIY

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.

Gotta go fast

Yes, I understand that the turn is half a mile past the big field, but my GPS knows that, too. This would be easier if you weren't about to ask me to repeat it all back to you.

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

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

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

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

P((B|A)|(A|B)) represents the probability that you'll mix up the order of the terms when using Bayesian notation.

In C, the multiocular O represents the bitwise norxondor gorgonax.

Romantic comedy heroines, I'm talking to you.

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.)

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

autoexec code posted by verified twitter users

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

Never give your password or bank account number to anyone who doesn't have a blue check mark next to their name.

Facebook, Apple, and Google all got away with their monopolist power grabs because they don't have any 'S's in their names for critics to snarkily replace with '$'s.

ARCTANGENT THETA = ENCHANT AT TARGET

If the first audio they downlink is from the descent, we probably won't be able to hear anything over the sound of the rover screaming.

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

Man, this trick has saved me so many times.

We'll pay you $1.47 to post on social media about our products, $2.05 to mention it in any group chats you're in, and 11 cents per passenger each time you drive your office carpool past one of our billboards.

Dear editors of Homeopathy Monthly: I have two small corrections for your July issue. One, it's spelled "echinacea", and two, homeopathic medicines are no better than placebos and your entire magazine is a sham.

Hi, I'm your new meteorologist and a former software developer. Hey, when we say 12pm, does that mean the hour from 12pm to 1pm, or the hour centered on 12pm? Or is it a snapshot at 12:00 exactly? Because our 24-hour forecast has midnight at both ends, and I'm worried we have an off-by-one error.

Pythagorean means are nice and all, but throwing the median in the pot is really what turns this into random forest statistics: applying every function you can think of, and then gradually dropping the ones that make the result worse.

Proper User Policy apparently means Simon Says.

She won the first half of all our chemo Scrabble games, but then her IV drugs started kicking in and I *dominated*.

To generate #1 albums, 'jay --help' recommends the -z flag.

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

I just caught myself idly trying to work out what that resistor mass would actually be, and realized I had self-nerd-sniped.

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

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

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

We need a special holiday to honor the countless kind souls with unsecured networks named 'linksys'.

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

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.

Officer suspended from horse.

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

It's a myth that you can never cross mountains safely, but be sure you understand how the climatic situation there will affect your parent thunderstorm.

If you walk out that door you'll be crossing the Rubicon with me, and that's one stream I'm not ready to cross.

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

Wait a minute. If I'm escaping from a submarine at 50 meters, then I'll *definitely* need a flashlight to find air pockets for gradual decompression on the way up. Time to start shopping professional dive lights.

Assume r' refers to the radius of Earth Prime, and r'' means radius in inches.

If you ever see the † dagger symbol with no unmatched footnote, it means the writer is saying the phrase while threatening you with a dagger.

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

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

If nothing else, that reasoning definitely overturns syllogisms.

I liked the idea, suggested by h00k on bash.org, of a Twitter bot that messages prominent politicians to tell them when they've unnecessarily used sms-speak abbreviations despite having plenty of characters left.

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

We carefully sampled the general population and found that most people are familiar with acquiescence bias.

A term coined by my friend Beth

In general, avoid exposure to any temperatures, pressures, particle energies, or states of matter that physicists think are neat.

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

Turns out I've been "practicing social distancing" for years without even realizing it was a thing!

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

The best thing about Strunk/White fanfiction is that it's virtually guaranteed to be well written.

Also, I hear the 4th root of (9^2 + 19^2/22) is pi.

"The only link we've found between the two documents is that a fragment of the Noah one mentions Aaron's brother Moses parting an ocean. Is that right?" "... yes. Yes, exactly."

Remember, your answers to the physics census are confidential; we will not be issuing Pauli exclusion principle citations.

At least people who make religious predictions of the apocalypse have an answer to the question 'Why didn't you predict any of the other ones that happened recently?'

This was my friend David's idea

Usain Bolt holds the world record in the 100 meter speedrun.

RIP, Gary.

3D graphs that don't contact the plane in the closure area may proceed as scheduled, but be alert for possible collisions with 2D graph lines that reach the hole and unexpectedly enter 3D space.

Things are rarely just crazy enough to work, but they're frequently just crazy enough to fail hilariously.

'Wow, that must be why you swallow so many of them per year!' 'No, that's spiders. You swallow WAY more ants.'

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.

The experimental math department's budget is under scrutiny for how much they've been spending on trains leaving Chicago at 9:00pm traveling at 45 mph.

Stay right there, we'll be back in a minute. We've just gotta brainstorm some new wonders. Have you all figured out gears yet? Yes? Crap.

... I wanna try. Hang on, be right back.

I hate being the slowest guy in the lab.

That card holds a refrigerator carton's worth of floppy discs, and a soda can full of those cards could hold the entire iTunes store's music library. Mmmm.

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

Never bring tequila to a key-signing party.

This really validates Jones's strategy of getting several thousand more votes than Smith. In retrospect, that was a smart move; those votes were crucial.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

The best camera is the one at L2.

Hipster CDC Reports Flu Epidemic Peaked Years Ago

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

I hate when people take photos of their meal instead of eating it, because there's nothing I love more than the sound of other people chewing.

Birds are Aves, which is part of the clade Theropoda, which is in Saurischia, which is in Dinosauria. Those birds outside our windows are dinosaurs. We can clear out the rest of our brains because we now have the best fact.

Subgroup analysis is ongoing.

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

Learning arcane bullshit from the 80s can break your computer, but if you're willing to wade through arcane bullshit from programmers in the 90s and 2000s, you can break everyone else's computers, too.

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

If you tune out again, when you tune back in you'll be hearing about dusty plasma fission fragment rockets.

I hear my brother Ricky won his school's egg drop by leaving the egg inside the hen.

I'm working on a car capable of evaluating arbitrarily complex boolean expressions on "honk if [...]" bumper stickers and responding accordingly.

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.

Roger Ebert once called you directionless and unwatchable.

According to every stud finder I've tried to use, my walls contain a rapidly shifting network of hundreds and hundreds of studs.

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

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

Once you've done this, make a note of how old they were. Then, when their age reaches double that, show them this chart again.

The robot is pregnant. It isn't mine.

Staplers are actually in Pseudosuchia, making them more closely related to crocodiles than to dinosaurs.

Hi all, just replying to loop in *@outlook.com and *@yahoo.com.

'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.

Maybe we're all gonna die, but we're gonna die in *really cool ways*.

After a while, the squirrel starts making that beeping noise and doesn't stop until it hops back up onto the stump.

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

I sympathize with the TPP protagonist because I, too, have progressed through a surprising number of stages of life despite spending entire days stuck against simple obstacles.

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

I'm in talks with Netflix to produce an alternate-universe crime drama about the world where sliced bread was never re-legalized, but it's going slowly because they keep changing their phone numbers and the door lock codes at their headquarters.

No, YOU stumble past a series of post-breakup hookups in a daze as you slowly realize what you've lost and how unlikely you are ever to get it back first.

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

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

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

I read in this one article that the breaking of electroweak symmetry is the reason we have SOULS. This guy with a degree said so!

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

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

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

It's rare to get both astronomers and astrologers equally mad at you, but apparently I've messed up both a bunch of star location databases AND the will of the fates.

Okay, everyone, cross yourselves, then cross the streams.

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

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.

Technically, both cars are haunted, but the murder ghosts can't stand listening to the broken GPS for more than a few minutes.

This one is a little bland. Pass the saltshaker?

The no-communication theorem states that no communication about the no-communication theorem can clear up the misunderstanding quickly enough to allow faster-than-light signaling.

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

Evidence suggests the 1899 transactions occurred as part of a global event centered around a deity associated with the lotus flower.

'Why on Earth would someone commit air piracy just to finance a terrible movie decades later?' 'People are very strange these days.'

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The rare compound solar-lunar-nephelogical eclipse

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

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

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

According to a new paper published in the journal Science, reporters are unable to thrive in an arsenic-rich environment.

Although regardless of how everything else shakes out, I definitely won't mind if the norm "wear a mask if you're feeling sick" sticks around after this.

I'm sure a discussion of the reason for the disappearance of adventure games in favor of RPGs would be fascinating

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

It's very hard to detect, but recent studies have determined that when plasma B cells are producing antibodies, they go 'pew pew pew'

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?

Disgusting

The bottom ones are also potentially bad news for any other planets in our solar system that have been counting on Earth having a stable orbit.

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

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.

It ships with a version of Google Now that alerts you when it's too late to leave for your appointments.

You can tell most people don’t really assign an absolute meaning to these numbers because in some places and time periods, “billion” has meant 1,000x what it's meant in others, and a lot of us never even noticed.

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

A helicopter bursts from a chrysalis and alights on a rock, rotors still damp.

I THINK EVERYONE INVOLVED HERE IS CUTE.

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

After exhausting the OED, we started numbering them. When overlapping hurricanes formed at all points on the Earth's surface, and our scheme was foiled by Cantor diagonalization, we just decided to name them all "Steve". Your local forecast tomorrow is "Steve". Good luck.

When you get to hell, tell smallpox we say hello.

Don't worry--you're less likely to die from a space launch than from a shark attack. The survival rate is pretty high for both!

Bad idea #271: Dropping into the half-pipe on a Segway.

Sn = tin

The MythBusters need to tackle whether a black hole from the LHC could REALLY destroy the world.

The graph is of the magnitude of the function with the real value between 0 and 2 and the imaginary between about 35 and 40. I've misplaced the exact parameters I used.

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

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.

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

I call Rule 34 on Wolfram's Rule 34.

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.

Controls are a little hard to figure out.

"Sir, it looked really cool." "Oh no--prestige TV. Okay, which of you has a terrible secret that's being slowly revealed to the audience through flashbacks? Just spit it out so we can escape this arc!"

You can do this one in every 30 times and still have 97% positive feedback.

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

I hope we can stop them

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.

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

I was really impressed by the accuracy of some of the report's predictions about fossil fuel consumption. Then I realized, oh, right, of course.

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

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

Speed limit c arcminutes^2 per steradian

Novel ideas and cool explosions are both good, but what I really want from a movie is novel ideas ABOUT cool explosions.

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

It me, your father.

Although Kansas is widely thought to contain the geographic center of the contiguous 48 states, topologists now believe that it's actually their outer edge.

At the bottom left: The mystery of why, when I know I needed to be asleep an hour ago, I decide it's a good time to read through every Wikipedia article in the categories 'Out-of-place artifacts', 'Earth mysteries', 'Anomalous weather', and 'List of people who disappeared mysteriously'.

There are a lot of graduate-educated young-earth creationists.

People tell me I have too much time on my hands, but really the problem is that there's too much time, PERIOD.

I'll never install a smart home smoke detector. It's not that I don't trust the software--it's that all software eventually becomes email, and I know how I am with email.

'Wait, why would you think a movie set in 1984 would do drive-ins as a retro promotion?' 'You know, 80s stuff. Drive-in movies. Britney Spears doing the hustle. Elvis going on Ed Sullivan and showing off his pog collection.' 'What year were you born, again?'

Bruce Schneier believes safewords are fundamentally insecure and recommends that you ask your partner to stop via public key signature.

Are Your Teens Practicing Amplexus? Learn These Six Telltale Signs!

'At the stroke of midnight, your brother will be hurtling sideways at an altitude of 150 meters' is a regular physics prediction about your nonmagical trebuchet, whereas 'you are cursed to build a brother-launching trebuchet' falls out of the Lagrangian.

Lot of drama in those days, including constant efforts to force the "Reflections on Trusting Trust" guy into retirement so we could stop being so paranoid about compilers.

Theoretical physicist: At the Planck length, uncountably many.

I can't speak for your other subjects, but MY motion was as smooth and natural as the framerate allowed.

The reverse only works if the subject has a nervous twitch.

Hell, my eighth grade science class managed to conclusively reject it just based on a classroom experiment. It's pretty sad to hear about million-dollar research teams who can't even manage that.

You're saying that the responsibility for avoiding miscommunication lies entirely with the listener, not the speaker, which explains why you haven't been able to convince anyone to help you down from that wall.

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.

Einstein's theories solved a longstanding mystery about Mercury: Why it gets so hot. "It's because," he pointed out, "the sun is right there."

This medicine says it may cause lightheadedness, dry mouth, and blurred vision, but my head feels incredibly heavy, water is pouring from my mouth, and I can see individual hummingbird wingbeats, so I think I'm fine.

In addition to gravity, burritos interact through the strong, weak, and electromagnetic forces, which is believed to be a major contributor to their popularity.

You can also just mash the keyboard at random, but you might end up with a gibberish name no one can pronounce.

Small devices use two-prong USB-AC, but there's also a three-prong version with a USB-B plug as the ground.

[*disables social networking accounts*] [*social isolation increases*] Wait, why does this ALSO feel bad?

Oh, weird, Amazon is out of butterfly nets.

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

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

Also, it's not like anyone actually calls up the Nobel committee to double-check things.

Good thing we're too smart to spend all day being uselessly frustrated with ourselves. I mean, that'd be a hell of a waste, right?

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

An occasional source of mild Thanksgiving tension in my family is that my mother is a die-hard fan of The Core (2003), and various family members sometimes have differing levels of enthusiasm for her annual tradition of watching it.

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

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

I recognize that chocolate is its own thing on which reasonable people may differ. Everything else here is objective fact.

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.

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

If you don't end the 99 Bottles of Beer recursion at N=0 it just becomes The Other Song That Never Ends.

Any arrangement is an edible arrangement if you're hungry enough.

The projection does a good job preserving both distance and azimuth, at the cost of really exaggerating how many South Americas there are.

Dr. Petroff has also shown that the Higgs boson signal was actually sparks from someone microwaving grapes, the EHT black hole photo was a frozen bagel someone left in too long, and the LIGO detection was just someone slamming the microwave door too hard.

Someone's probably working on an eBook app where, if you stop reading right before some plot twist happens, the app will wait a while and then send you a breaking news alert about what's happening, prompting you to open it and read the next few pages to learn more.

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

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

The xkcd.com sysadmin has a Q2010, and I can attest that it can handle a fall down several flight of concrete steps. Relatedly, he's upset with me -- I hope he doesn't take revenge by messing with my site's contenDISREGARD THAT I SUCK COCKS

'Hey, what are those futuristic goggles for, anyway?' 'Oh, this is just a broken Google Glass. It was 2010's night at the club.'

"But there are seven billion people in the world! I can't possibly stop to consider how ALL of them might interpret something!" "Ah, yes, there's no middle ground between 'taking personal responsibility for the thoughts and feelings of every single person on Earth' and 'covering your eyes and ears and yelling logically correct statements into the void.' That's a very insightful point and not at all inane."

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

Not sure why I just taught everyone to flawlessly impersonate me to pretty much anyone I know. Just remember to constantly bring up how cool it is that birds are dinosaurs and you'll be set.

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

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 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

Chuck Jones is a vengeful god.

When Salvador Dalí died, it took months to get all the flagpoles sufficiently melted.

'Petit' being a reference to Le Petit Prince, which I only thought about halfway through the sketch

Sorry, in SI units that's "there's a big football in there."

The hard part about opening a hole in the proof of the Poincaré conjecture is that Grigori Perelman will come out of retirement to try to fix it by drawing a loop around the hole and contracting it to a point.

<3 If there's anything you can do, I'll let you know. For the moment, any simple distracting online games sent to sick@xkcd.com will not go unappreciated [EDIT: Holy crap 2,700 games before noon. I love you guys; thank you. They will be passed along and played by us all.]

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

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

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

If the celestial sphere were mapped to the Earth's surface, astronomy would get a LOT easier; you'd just need a magnifying glass.

This is even better than my previous smartphone casemod: an old Western Electric Model 2500 desk phone handset complete with a frayed, torn-off cord dangling from it.

I'm trying to share my footage of the full run to prove it's not tool-assisted, but the uploader has problems with video lengths of more than a decade.

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

And even though it all went wrong / I'll stand before the lord of song / with nothing on my tongue but 'I don't understand, I swear I backed up my keyboard config before messing with it'

I never understood why someone would expect me to accept their rules right after they'd punched me. I'm sure it's all very symbolic or something.

NO FATE BUT THE NARRATIVES WE IMPOSE ON LIFE'S RANDOM CHAOS TO DISTRACT OURSELVES FROM OUR EXISTENTIAL PLIGHT

Actually, I think if all higher math professors had to write for the Simple English Wikipedia for a year, we'd be in much better shape academically.

The Piña Colada song carves a trajectory across the chart over the course of the song.

So far Voyager 1 has 'left the Solar System' by passing through the termination shock three times, the heliopause twice, and once each through the heliosheath, heliosphere, heliodrome, auroral discontinuity, Heaviside layer, trans-Neptunian panic zone, magnetogap, US Census Bureau Solar System statistical boundary, Kuiper gauntlet, Oort void, and crystal sphere holding the fixed stars.

I've been trying for a couple years now but I haven't been able to come up with a name dumber than 'Renesmee'.