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

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"Mostly it means that I'm acutely aware that the kid one table over coughed as the server walked past with our food."

My bracket has 76 trombones led by John Philip Sousa facing off against thousands of emperor penguins led by Morgan Freeman.

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

A new study finds that if you give rats a cell phone and a lever they can push to improve the signal, the rats will chew on the cell phone until it breaks and your research supervisors will start to ask some questions about your grant money.

Despite years of effort by my physics professors to normalize it, deep down I remain convinced that 'dynamical' is not really a word.

The Atlantic is expanding at about 10 ppm (points per month).

"That last LinkedIn request set a new record for the most energetic physical event ever observed. Maybe we should respond." "Nah."

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'.

Fortunately, exactly zero other annoying internet behaviors have developed during this time.

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

In my reboot, Dennis the Menace was just trying to send Mr. Wilson a nice comet, but accidentally wiped out his dinosaur garden.

I always felt like what the 'you are now aware of your tongue' thing needed in order to be truly enjoyable was an element of mortal peril.

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

'Sailor Moon's head exploded once' and 'Some men have explosive orgasms' both work for the Great Lakes from west to east (Paddle-to-the-Sea order).

But the past was much too cramped!

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.

'Why are you standing in the yard wearing a papal hat and a robe covered in seeds?' 'Well, the Pope is visiting our town next month ...'

Anyway, that's a common misconception. Geese live for a long time; all the ones we can see will probably keep flying around for billions of years before they explode.

I don't see how; the C0 block is right there at the beginning.

On January 26th, 2274 Mars days into the mission, NASA declared Spirit a 'stationary research station', expected to stay operational for several more months until the dust buildup on its solar panels forces a final shutdown.

Suckville is considered by the Census Bureau to be part of the Detroit metropolitan statistical area, despite not being located anywhere near Detroit.

I believe the truth always lies halfway between the most extreme claims.

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.

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

Time to dance in front of Mary Jane! If I'm lucky, she'll turn out not to practice pre-copulatory sexual cannibalism!

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

I always figured you should never bring a gun to a gun fight because then you'll be part of a gun fight.

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

Next, let's assume the decision of whether to take the Axiom of Choice is made by a deterministic process ...

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

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

Juraaaassic Park, Juraaaassic Park, God shed his grace on theeeee

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

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

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

Historians: Contemporaneous documentation of the initial events is often sparse, and in fact people often get testy and uncooperative when we urge better documentation for the historical record.

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

BREAKING: Senator's bold pro-podium stand leads to primary challenge from prescriptivist base.

New research shows over 60% of the financial collapse's toxic assets were created by power drills.

Mile High Club membership [✓] [ ] Discovery of parts of Amelia Earhart's skeleton [ ] [ ] Mid-flight incident that results in safe landing on the Hudson River [✓] [ ]

What if what *I* see as blue, *you* see as a slightly different blue because you're using Chrome instead of Firefox and despite a decade of messing with profiles we STILL can't get this right somehow.

"Want to feel old?" "Yes."

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

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.

The key caps use LCD displays for all the vowels, so they can automatically adjust over the years to reflect ongoing vowel shifts while allowing you to keep typing phonetically.

P.S. We're going to the beach this weekend, so I'm attaching my preregistration forms for that trip now, before we find out whether it produces any interesting results.

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.

The same goes for the one where you're wrestling the Green Ranger in the swimming pool full of Crisco. You guys all have that dream, right? It's not just me. Right?

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

Revised directive: It is forbidden for you to interfere with human history until you've at least taken a class on it.

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

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

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

People go to the website because they can't wait for the next alumni magazine, right? What do you mean, you want a campus map? One of our students made one as a CS class project back in '01! You can click to zoom and everything!

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

Some personal news: After treating my first case a few years ago with antibiotics, I can report that I have now had appendicitis for the second and--unless something extremely unexpected happened with the surgery--final time.

The worst was the time they accidentally held the can upside down and froze all the Earth's magma chambers solid.

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

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

'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.'

I wanted to make the world's fastest yawl, so I made the aft sail bigger, but apparently that means it's not a yawl anymore! It's a real ketch-22.

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

He probably just poops over the side of the sleigh.

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

If I wait a while, it's not so bad, because then it's just shaped like me, plus some pipes and tanks and probably eventually all of Earth's oceans.

We've gotten him up to 20% milk and cookies through an aggressive public campaign, but that seems to be his dietary limit. Anything above that and he starts developing nutritional deficiencies.

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

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

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

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.

Effect strength => [unstoppable] | Effect range => [2 miles] | Effect duration => [1 year]

Mathematicians quickly determined that it spells ANT BNECN, an unusual theoretical dish which was not successfully cooked until Andrew Wiles made it for breakfast in the 1990s.

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

If you've never had sex, this is what it feels like. Complete with the brief feeling of satisfaction, followed by ennui, followed by getting bored and trying to make it happen again.

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

Sometimes, parts of a slowly-rising mountain suddenly rise REALLY fast, which is extra interesting.

Volunteers needed for a study on transmission of urushiol from digital contact with thin strips of fibrous cellulose pulp.

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]

I've developed a novel propulsion system powered by loss of precision in unit conversion.

Our company is agile and lean with a focus on the long tail. Ok, our company is actually a polecat I found in my backyard.

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

Edward Tufte's 'The Visual Display of Quantitative Information' is a fantastic book, and should be required reading for anyone in either the sciences or graphic design.

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

'I can't believe I'm saying this, but I wish Aquaman were here instead--HE'D be able to help.'

Every time we detect an asteroid from outside the Solar System, we should immediately launch a mission to fling one of our asteroids back in the direction it came from.

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

My most famous drawing, and one of the first I did for the site

Anyone who is caught counting 'three ... two ... one ... zero ... GO!' will be punished with a lifetime of eating only ISO standard food samples.

Strangely, they still celebrate by eating hot dogs. Since they don't have mouths, they just kinda toss them in the air and let them fall back down into their propeller blades. It's pretty messy.

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

Hey guys! What's eating you? Ha ha ha it's me! Oh, what fun we have.

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

He was the first person to land a 900, which is especially impressive because pulling off a half-integer spin requires obeying Fermi-Dirac statistics.

Feynman recounted another good one upperclassmen would use on freshmen physics students: When you look at words in a mirror, how come they're reversed left to right but not top to bottom? What's special about the horizontal axis?

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

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

'Dude, wait -- I'm not American! So my risk is basically zero!'

U+FDD0 is actually Unicode for the eye of the basilisk, though for safety reasons no font actually renders it.

The foil on the toothpick represents the blue flash.

I tried oxidizing them, but your bank uses some really weird paper and it wouldn't light.

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

Hey, I don't make the rules. It's in the book.

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

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

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

[scrolling through a giant spreadsheet of transcribed data] 'Wow, a surprising number of users grew up at 420 69th St.' 'Yeah, must be a high-rise or something.'

I can't wait until I'm fully vaccinated and can safely send chat messages in all caps again.

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

West Norsussex is east of East Norwessex, but they're both far north of Middlesex and West Norwex.

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

Even if the dictionaries are starting to give in, I refuse to accept 'octopi' as a word mainly because--I'm not making this up--there's a really satisfying climactic scene in the Orson Scott Card horror novel 'Lost Boys' which hinges on it being an incorrect pluralization.

The nice thing about headcannnons is that it's really easy to get other people to believe in them.

It's an amazing time of day; the light is great for photography.

'Well, there's speculation that it's due to a mantle hotspot.' --a geologist who's trying to cover up the fact that they didn't hear your question

Of course, the assert doesn't work.

Why are we spending billions to ruin Mars with swarms of robots when Elon Musk has promised to ruin Mars for a FRACTION of the cost?

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

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

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

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.

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

I wonder how often Patrick Stewart has Darmok flashbacks when talking to Star Trek fans.

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

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.

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.

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

I do this constantly

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!"

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

An 'American tradition' is anything that happened to a baby boomer twice.

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

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

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

I can't help myself; now I want to read a bunch of thinkpieces from newspapers in Biff's 1985 arguing over whether the growth of the region into a corporate dystopia was inevitable.

Did you know sociologists can't explain why people keep repeating that urban legend about bumblebees not being able to fly!?

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

Mrs. Roberts would have gotten up sooner, of course, but she was busy piping find ~ and find ~nomad into xargs shred, just in case.

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

They always try to explain that they're called 'solar physicists', but the reporters interrupt with "NEVER MIND THAT, TELL US WHAT'S WRONG WITH THE SUN!"

Update: I've been banned from the physics department for the way I pronounce "Doppler effect."

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

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

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

In ordering #5, self-driving cars will happily drive you around, but if you tell them to drive to a car dealership, they just lock the doors and politely ask how long humans take to starve to death.

"I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on Venus and returning him safely to--" [an aide frantically whispers in the president's ear for a moment] "... of landing a man on Venus."

The problem with Haskell is that it's a language built on lazy evaluation and nobody's actually called for it.

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

'Baby Got Back' turned 20 this year. My favorite nostalgia show is VH1's 'I Love The Inexorable March of Time Toward the Grave That Awaits Us All.'

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

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

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

I adopted a cat that weighs 12 solar masses. Laser pointers love chasing it.

Gonna feel even dumber when I realize that all this time he's been talking into a bluetooth thingy and we're not actually friends.

Each particle also has a password which allows its properties to be changed, but the cosmic censorship hypothesis suggests we can never observe the password itself—only its secure hash.

[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.]

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

A hydroelectric dam is also known as a heavy water reactor.

For sentimental reasons, every active Mars rover is counted as one person, although that's not enough to make Mars more than a dot.

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

"Radians Fahrenheit or radians Celsius?" "Uh, sorry, gotta go!"

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

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

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

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

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

After meeting with a few of the subjects, the IRB actually recommended that you stop stressing out so much about safety guidelines.

[Decades in the future] "Well, the good news is that we've received definitive communication from aliens. The bad news is that they're asking about Cats (2019)."

It turns out that saying "Oh, so THAT'S why they call it Boxing Day" is a good way to get punched a second time.

Sure, you can talk about per-capita adjustment, but if you want to solve the problem, it's obvious that this is the group you need to focus on.

It has so many advantages--it preserves Martian life, requires fewer interplanetary launches, and makes it much easier to field-test Mars rovers.

The other great lakes are just water on the far side of Canada Island. If you drive north from the Pacific northwest you actually cross directly into Alaska, although a few officials--confused by the Mercator distortion--have put up border signs.

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

But then the Ghost of Subjunctive Past showed up and told me to stay strong on 'if it were'.

But Einstein said it was the most powerful force in the universe, and I take all my investment advice from flippant remarks by theoretical physicists making small talk at parties.

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

Both arXiv and archive.org are invaluable projects which, if they didn't exist, we would dismiss as obviously ridiculous and unworkable.

The list includes polio, Guinea worm, and this one particular enterovirus strain that they've been tracking out of spite after it went around the lab a few years ago.

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

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

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.

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

"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."

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!

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

Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they should, they didn't stop to think if they could.

’"‘”’" means "I edited this text on both my phone and my laptop before sending it"

Not to go all sentence fragment on you.

First comes blood / Then we perish / Then comes Death in his Eternity Carriage.

Just make sure you don't have it maximize instead of minimize.

This exotic blade was wrought from a different fallen star. The meteorite was a carbonaceous chondrite, so it's basically a lump of gravel glued into the shape of a sword. A SPACE sword!

If you don't have an extension cord I can get that too. Because we're friends! Right?

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

Crap, I have levitation class at 25:131. Better set the alarm to 'cinnamon'.

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

If nothing else, that reasoning definitely overturns syllogisms.

A solid red area with two white lines means that you have been infected with the anti-coronavirus, COVID+19, which will cure anyone you have close contact with.

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.'

When we started distributing special status tokens that signify which people are important enough to join an elite group, we never could have imagined we might be creating some problems down the line.

ARCTANGENT THETA = ENCHANT AT TARGET

Also, I apologize for the time I climbed down into your world and everyone freaked out about the lesbian orgy overseen by a priest.

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

It's probably for the best. Since Roombas are native to North America, it's illegal for Americans to keep them in their houses under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act.

I *do* hear that they're the most comfortable thing to wear on your feet since sliced bread.

I love Eileen / and want you to love her / When you're around / I'm one floor above her / If you could see / just how much I adore her / Oh, that pretty red dress / I'd do anything for her / (Too ra loo ra too ra loo rye ayy)

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.

It's true, I think about this all the time.

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

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

To compensate for this, I plan to spend 2013 doing nothing but talking about Mayans. My relationships with my friends and family may not fare well.

A lot of sentences undergo startling shifts in mood if you add 'like this one' to the end, but high on the list is 'I'm a neurologist studying dreams.'

General solutions get you a 50% tip.

A circle with an A in it means that the circuit has committed a sin and has been marked as punishment.

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

Use your mouse or fingers to pan + zoom. To edit the map, submit your ballot on November 6th.

Too good not to happen.

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

During the second semester, the path is briefly routed through the dishwasher.

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

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

It beat out 'Clock radio alarm', 'B-flat at 194 decibels', 'That noise from Dumb & Dumber', and 'Recording of a sobbing voice begging you to answer'.

I'm so glad NASA let you take your phone to Mars!

Technically DC isn't a state, but no one is too pedantic about it because they don't want to disturb the snakes.

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

Don't worry, the dogs are all fine. That's actually kind of the problem.

I mean, it's been almost twenty years. Now, it's possible you're simply embedding Windows directory paths in your URIs, but in that case you need more than just a short lecture.

Programming the sexbots to enjoy sex seemed a sensible move at the time, but we didn't realize the consequences of their developing fetishes.

Delaware hopes to explore the western edge of areas marked with the Belgian flag, once the tornadoes die down.

I've got the Craigslist post ready to go! I wasn't sure what category it should go in, so I listed it as property and put that it has 'good sun exposure.'

And they both react poorly to showers.

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

Earth clearly hasn't been inspected, since it's definitely contaminated with salmonella.

ALERT: Some pending mandatory software updates require version 21.1.2 of the Oracle/Sun Java(tm) JDK(tm) Update Manager Runtime Environment Meta-Updater, which is not available for your platform.

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

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.

It's like sigma summation notation, except instead of summing the argument over all values of i, you 2 the argument over all values of 2.

I hear this is an option in the latest Ubuntu release.

Even the identity matrix doesn't work normally

There's also a unicode-handling bug in the URL request library, and we're storing the passwords unsalted ... so if we salt them with emoji, we can close three issues at once!

The henchmen Bebop and Rocksteady have hijacked the musical genres for us just like the Lone Ranger hijacked the William Tell Overture for our parents.

40 digits: You are optimistic about our understanding of the nature of distance itself.

Their Sun and gravity will make you, uh, something, I guess. Out of earshot from Earth, mostly.

factory --- spire --- onslaught --- extractor --- judge

Following this, the pong paddle went on a mission to destroy Atari headquarters and, due to a mixup, found himself inside the game The Matrix Reloaded. Boy, was THAT ever hard to explain to him.

Physicists who want to protect traditional Christmas realize that the only way to keep from changing Christmas is not to observe it.

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

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.

Maybe if I spin it back and forth really fast I can do some kind of pulse-width modulation.

'Is it worth anything?' 'I dunno, is the answer to that question worth another $5?'

The days of the week are Monday, Arctic, Wellesley, Green, Electra, Synergize, and the Seventh Seal.

FYI, it turns out "...because I haven't figured out whether he would be my brother-in-law or not" does NOT qualify as a "reason why these two should not be wed."

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.

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

My liege, we were able to follow the ship into Minkowski space, but now they've jumped to Hilbert space and they could honestly be anywhere.

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

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

I'm inside your head and I hate it. Please let me out.

This was actually drawn years before Red Spiders

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

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

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

With just one extra line, he could have anticipated the 2003 film The Core, but some things are too audacious for even the greatest visionaries.

It's not my fault I haven't had a chance to measure the curvature of this particular universe.

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

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

Running for office in Minnesota on the single-issue platform 'dig a permanent channel through the Traverse Gap because it will make this map more satisfying.'

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

BUT WHAT IF I REASSURE MYSELF WITH A JOKE AND THEN DON'T WORRY ABOUT THE RASH AND IT TURNS OUT TO BE DEATH MITES AND I COULD HAVE CAUGHT IT

FYI: I'll be releasing a wolf into a randomly-chosen front yard sometime in the next 30 years. Now your fear is reasonable, and you don't need to feel embarrassed anymore. Problem solved!

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.

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

My favorite thing to do at parties is to talk judgmentally about people who aren't there.

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

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

Thanks to differences in logging regulations, the messages actually turned out to be visible from the air.

"Although fresh juice DOES sound--" "NO! For humanity to survive we must learn from the mistakes of the past."

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

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

The Gordian knot is an omniknot tied using every bend in the Ashley Book of Knots, and then for extra security the upper rope at every crossing is connected to the lower with a randomly-chosen hitch.

Note that this implies you should NOT honk solely because I stopped for a pedestrian and you're behind me.

In protest of SOPA, I'm currently getting totally blacked out.

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

'How long are you going to keep this up?' 'Statistically, only four or five more decades.'

Due to their proximity across the channel, there's long been tension between North Korea and the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Southern Ireland.

Our anti-de Sitter club is small at the moment, but I've started corresponding with the conformal field theory people.

And if clicking on any word pops up a site-search for articles about that word, I will close all windows in a panic and never come back.

A schism between the pro-panhandle and anti-panhandle factions eventually led to war, but both sides spent too much time working on their flag designs to actually do much fighting.

Sometimes when I steer shopping carts around corners, I slide them a little and pretend I'm getting the blue spark boost.

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

Why did we even have that thing?

They have a telescope pointed RIGHT AT US!

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.

Where did you even get this wall? Return it there and stand it back up right now.

This hostname is going in dozens of remote config files. Changing a kid's name is comparatively easy!

Be careful—it's breeding season, and some of these can be *extremely* defensive of their nests.

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

If you actually do this, what really happens is Douglas Hofstadter appears and talks to you for eight hours about strange loops.

My shooting will improve over the short term, but over the long term the universe will take more shots.

While it seemed like a fun prank at the time, I realize my prank fire extinguishers full of leaded gasoline were a mistake.

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

You say this daily walk will reduce my risk of death from cardiovascular disease by 30%, but also increase my risk of death by bear attack by 300%? That's a 280% increased! I'm not a sucker; I'm staying inside.

[20 minutes later] ", hi."

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

I wanna hold your hand so I don't fall out of your gyrocopter.

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

NASA may not want to admit it, but at this point they ARE the 90's Kid Space Program.

When you talk about the job experience you'll give me, why do you pronounce 'job' with a long 'o'?

And the journal is filled with all the things I'd say to her if I were nice like you. I burn it when it's full.

And now I might never get to again.

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

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

As a first step, they can put in a secondary deck, to help drivers try it out and find out how fun the jumps are. After a while no one will use the old flat deck and they can remove it.

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

Then I'm going to go on a weeks-long somatic hypermutation bender, producing ever-more targeted antibodies, while I continue to remain distanced and follow guidance from public health authorities.

This one is a little bland. Pass the saltshaker?

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

We don't sell products; we sell the marketplace. And by 'sell the marketplace' we mean 'play shooters, sometimes for upwards of 20 hours straight.'

Guess who has two thumbs and spent the night in an ER after trying to rescue a kitten that ran under his car at a stoplight and climbed up into the engine compartment? And, thanks to antibiotics, will continue having two thumbs? THIS GUY. (P.S. kitten is safe!)

Our models fall apart where the three theories overlap; we're unable to predict what happens when a nanometer-sized squirrel eats a grapefruit with the mass of the sun.

It was bound to happen eventually. This data theft will enable almost limitless [xkcd.com/792]-style password reuse attacks in the coming weeks. There's only one group that comes out of this looking smart: Everyone who pirated Photoshop.

You can also just ignore any science assertion where 'quantum mechanics' is the most complicated phrase in it.

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

And to you, I leave my life-sized ice sculpture replica of the Pietà which was blessed by the Pope. You must never let it melt! Now, remember, all gifts must be removed from my estate within 24 hours.

The plural of anecdote may not be data, but the singular of data is anecdote.

If you live in the Northern hemisphere, anyway. In the southern hemisphere, due to the coriolis effect, babies are born nine months BEFORE they're conceived.

If you live in Los Angeles (around 33°52'N, roughly the latitude of Hermosa Beach) the black hole in V404 Cygni passes over you each day. On Christmas Day it will be directly overhead around 2pm.

Favorite mastectomy breast prosthesis idea: a fake boob containing a spare rechargable battery, accessed via a nipple USB port. Complete with a ring of LED charge indicators in the areola!

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

You will be led to judgement like lambs to the slaughter--a simile whose existence, I might add, will not do your species any favors.

If the breaking news is about an event at a hospital or a lab, move it all the way over to the right.

No one wants an explanation more than us. Except Ms. Garofalo.

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

The worst is when you wipe out in the barrel and you're trapped for several million years until erosion frees you.

An idling gas engine may be annoyingly loud, but that's the price you pay for having WAY less torque available at a standstill.

It's a good mountain but it really peaked in the 80s.

Trivia: Roger Daltry originally wrote 'Don't try an' Digg what we all say' but erased the second 'g' when he moved to reddit.

"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."

I mean, we already live in a world of flying robots killing people. I don't worry about how powerful the machines are, I worry about who the machines give power to.

It's not just time zones and leap seconds. SI seconds on Earth are slower because of relativity, so there are time standards for space stuff (TCB, TGC) that use faster SI seconds than UTC/Unix time. T2 - T1 = [God doesn't know and the Devil isn't telling.]

Did he just go crazy and jump out the window?

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

Actual quote from The Demo: '... an advantage of being online is that it keeps track of who you are and what you’re doing all the time ...'

Some future reader, who may see the term, without knowing the history of it, may imagine that it had reference to some antiquated bridge of the immortal Poet, thrown across the silver Avon, to facilitate his escape after some marauding excursion in a neighbouring park; and in some Gentleman's Magazine of the next century, it is not impossible, but that future antiquaries may occupy page after page in discussing so interesting a matter. We think it right, therefore, to put it on record in the Oriental Herald that the 'Shakesperian Rope Bridges' are of much less classic origin; that Mr Colin Shakespear, who, besides his dignity as Postmaster, now signs himself 'Superintendent General of Shakesperian Rope Bridges', is a person of much less genius than the Bard of Avon. --The Oriental Herald, 1825

SOUND DOGS MAKE: [BARKING] [HISSING] [LIGHTSABER NOISES] [FLUENT ENGLISH] [SWEARING]

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

They're standing at the lip of the canyon, which isn't clear at all.

I don't understand why people are so disingenuous! I just want someone to walk with!

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

'Am I taking care of you? I have a thesis to write!' 'My parents are at their house; you visited last--' 'No, no, explain like you're five.'

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

Just think of all the countless petty squabbles and misunderstandings, of all the fervent hatreds, over so insignificant a thing as the direction and duration of a rocket engine firing.

Oh no, my marshmallow became tidally locked!

People aren't going to change, for better or for worse. Technology's going to be so cool. All in all, the future will be okay! Except climate; we fucked that one up.

Hey, are you friends with any hamsters? This kite needs a passenger.

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

There's Livejournal drama between those who want to wear human suits over fursuits and those who just take off the fursuits.

CORRECTION: After careful evaluation, we have determined that the axis label on this chart was printed backward.

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

If anyone tries this on you, the best reply is a deadpan "Oh yeah, that's a common potato chip flavor in Canada."

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.

No, tell the park rangers to calm down, it's fine--I put a screen on the front. I just want to get the birds a little closer.

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

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

If you read all vaguebooking/vaguetweeting with the assumption that they're saying everything they can without revealing classified military information, the internet gets way more exciting.

Force-choking the chicken.

"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 know it seems unpleasant, but of the two ways we typically transfer them, I promise this is the one you want.

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.

Astronomy (or "astrology" in British English) is the study of ...

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

I may have also tossed one of a pair of teleportation rings into the ocean, with interesting results.

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

I think it's the sheep zapping the cactus and not vice-versa

The laws of physics are fun to try to understand, but as an organism with incredibly delicate eyes who evolved in a world full of sharp objects, I have an awful lot of trust in biology's calibration of my flinch reflex.

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

If you drill at the right angle and time things perfectly, your core sample can include a section of a rival team's coring equipment.

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

I always figured the word 'blog' would sound *less* silly as the years went by.

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

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

My first try at drawing a real face in years

It was great until my thumb slipped and I accidentally launched my telescope into the air at Mach 8.

Hopefully the HVAC people set it to only affect the AIR in the room.

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

Don't be nervous about the robots, be nervous about the people with the resources to build them.

Cracked.com is another inexplicable browser narcotic. They could write a list of '17 worst haircuts in the Ottoman Empire' and I'd read through to the end, then click on all the links at the end.

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

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'.

Oh, huh, so you didn't know that story?

Oh, I think this word might mean 'Crisco'!

We can't let this happen again. We need to build a secure TWO-day-before-retirement safe room.

Yes, I mean she said that during sex. Yes, it was a little weird.

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

Why would anyone ever, ever say that? Please, nobody ever say that.

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