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

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.

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

It's taken me 20 years to get over skyline tetris.

Theoretical physicist: At the Planck length, uncountably many.

They try to pad their numbers in the annual reports by counting Galileo's redundant systems as multiple computers, but they're falling behind badly either way.

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

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

For many of the anatomy pictures on Wikipedia, I think this is actually not far from reality. They only look all formal and professional due to careful cropping.

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

We could organize a nationwide old-photo-album search, but the real Worst McFly is probably lost to time.

I won't eat invertebrates, because I can fight a skeleton, but I have no idea what kind of spooky warrior a squid leaves behind.

The TI-86 was bad enough. I don't know how I'd have gotten through high school if I'd had a laptop+wifi.

You should talk to the girl down the hall; I think you'd like her. Lemme know if you find out why she's ordering all those colored plastic balls.

We remember Rugrats, and think of them every time our kids look at us through their baby gates.

Under the 'has cleared its orbital neighborhood' and 'fuses hydrogen into helium' definitions, thanks to human activities Earth technically no longer qualifies as a planet but DOES count as a star.

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

The pile gets soaked with data and starts to get mushy over time, so it's technically recurrent.

Cue angry letters from all seven fans of Xenocide.

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

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. 🙏🚁🎖️"

Congratulations to whoever wished for revenge on a forest near the Tunguska River, a 1980 Chevy Malibu in Peekskill NY, Alabama resident Ann Hodges, every building in Chelyabinsk with glass windows, and the non-avian dinosaurs.

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

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

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

If you're turning 27 and were born in the Northeast, maybe you were conceived in the April blizzard of 1982. Imagine: snowed in, candles, massage oil, your mom sporting nothing but her early 80's haircut and a smile ... aren't you glad you read the title-text?

Don't forget the time you spend finding the chart to look up what you save. And the time spent reading this reminder about the time spent. And the time trying to figure out if either of those actually make sense. Remember, every second counts toward your life total, including these right now.

It looks good, but it needs more postfixins.

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.

Ok, how many coins for a cinnamon roll?

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

Our nucleic acid recovery techinques found a great deal of homo sapiens DNA incorporated into the fossils, particularly the ones containing high levels of resin, leading to the theory that these dinosaurs preyed on the once-dominant primates.

How many points do you get for dunking every basketball in existence at once?

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.)

This replaces the previous solar activity watch, which was issued last month when the sun took off its sunglasses.

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

The strongest incentive we have to develop faster-than-light travel is that it would let us apologize in advance.

It's possible. Better to be on the safe side.

I hate how many times you have to press it to get to the system normal people use, degrees Rømer.

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.

'The mountains near here formed when the ... Newfoundland ... microplate collided with, uhh ... Labrador.' 'Ok, now you're definitely just naming dogs.' 'Wait, no, that's actually almost correct.'

Spherical or parabolic reflectors would of course lead to aberrant behavior.

For some reason, my childhood suspension of disbelief had no problem with the fact that this ancient galaxy is full of humans, but was derailed by language. There's no Asia OR Europe there, so where'd they get all the Indo-European roots?

Her daughter is named Help I'm trapped in a driver's license factory.

"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."

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

It's amazing what it does for YouTube comments.

I have accidentally watered virtually every person and object in Pelican Town.

Thanks to the ForcedEntry exploit, your company's entire tech stack can now be hosted out of a PDF you texted to someone.

Most of our universe consists of dark matter rendered completely undetectable by our spacetime codec's dynamic range issues.

The fact that things like the npm left-pad incident are so rare is oddly reassuring.

Wait, sorry, I got mixed up--he's actually almost 50. It's the kid from The Karate Kid who just turned 40.

Also, they're getting increasingly worried that someone will accidentally hit the 'retract' button, and that the end of the cable thrashing around as it winds up could devastate the Earth's surface.

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

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

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

Employment statistics have to correct for the fact that the Weird Bug Hotline hires on a bunch of extra temporary staff every 17 years.

My pet theory is that in real life, the kid at the beginning of Jurassic Park who made fun of the 'six-foot turkey' never got a talking-to from Dr. Grant, and grew up to produce several of the movie's sequels.

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

Good point--making no decision is itself a decision. So that's a THIRD option I have to research!

Man, this trick has saved me so many times.

On the other hand, physicists like to say physics is to math as sex is to masturbation.

You know I've always hated her.

That's a gneiss butte.

To avoid errors like this, we render all text and pipe it through OCR before processing, fixing a handful of irregular bugs by burying them beneath a smooth, uniform layer of bugs.

$Jill and Jack / began to frack. / The oil boosts their town. / But fractures make / the bedrock shake / and Jack came tumbling down.$

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

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

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

I'm not a lawyer, but I believe zones like this are technically considered the high seas, so if you cut a pizza into a spiral there you could be charged with pieracy under marinaritime law.

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

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

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

[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)."

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

Although bees with tires would be kinda funny.

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

I'm leaving you for your twin. He's more mature than you by now.

I pronounce the 'u' in 'pronunciation' like in 'putting' but the 'ou' in 'pronounce' like in 'wound'.

When Guitar Hero 2 comes out I'll have fresh conversational material for MONTHS.

People think power over ethernet is so great, and yet when I try to do water over ethernet everyone yells at me.

There's a cool mental calculation hack I recently learned for this: If you open the calendar app on your phone or computer, the highest-numbered box along the bottom is equal to the number of days in the month!

Although the oral exam for the doctorate was just 'can you do that weird laugh?'

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

Some say the world will end in fire; some say in segfaults.

'Why don't you just point it at their eye directly?' 'What is this, 2007?'

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

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

The LEGO Group is already the world's largest tire manufacturer.

Geometry textbooks always try to trick you by adding decorative stripes and dotted lines.

DOWNSIDES: Adobe people may periodically email your newsroom to ask you to call it an 'Adobe® PDF document,' but they'll reverse course once they learn how sarcastically you can pronounce the registered trademark symbol.

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

And the baby has a fever.

Asbestos is bad; definitely get the one on the right. Wait -- this one over here has no swine flu! Now I can't decide.

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

a(b+c)=(ab)+(ac). Politicize that, bitches.

Surrounded by boring mysteries.

Support your local paper, unless it's just been bought by some sinister hedge fund or something, which it probably has.

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.

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

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

'Hey Megan, it's your father. How do I print out a flowchart?'

'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!'

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

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.

A lot of Jedi romances start with this turning into a Lady and the Tramp spaghetti situation.

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

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

Remember the CPS 2000, the super soaker that was discontinued because it was too powerful? Relatedly, can I borrow your tuba?

Ooh, another one. Uh ... the ability to alter any coefficients of friction at will during sporting events.

There are more Trump voters in California than Texas, more Biden voters in Texas than New York, more Trump voters in New York than Ohio, more Biden voters in Ohio than Massachusetts, more Trump voters in Massachusetts than Mississippi, and more Biden voters in Mississippi than Vermont.

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

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

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

I bet if I yell at my scared friends I will feel better.

Someone bring me a pocket fan so I can drift around the yard.

Except for anything by Lewis Carroll or Tolkien, you get five made-up words per story. I'm looking at you, Anathem.

Someday I'll be rich enough to hire Nate Silver to help make all my life decisions. 'Should I sleep with her?' 'Well, I'm showing a 35% chance it will end badly.'

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.

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

Fixating on this seems unhealty. But in general, the more likely I think a crash is, the less likely one becomes, which is a strange kind of reverse placebo effect.

[after typing 1,500 words on feathered dinosaurs, paleontology, sexism, lava, and dinosaurs as animals rather than movie monsters] Sorry to cut it short, I'm on my phone. When I'm back at a keyboard, I can give you another 5,000 words.

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

INSIDE ELON MUSK'S NEW ATOMIC CAT

You don't use science to show that you're right, you use science to become right.

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

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

Under my system, boxing and football suffered, pair figure skating still worked but had to adapt by dropping some moves, and pro wrestling was actually completely unaffected.

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.

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.

This works on pretty much every level.

I do this constantly

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

'The sad thing is that I just wanted to talk about your poor smoke-bomb techniques.'

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

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

Imagine you could ride alongside a sound wave. It would probably be pretty cool, right? We're putting in a departmental budget request to buy a really fast plane so we can check it out.

All electromagnetic equations: The same as all fluid dynamics equations, but with the 8 and 23 replaced with the permittivity and permeability of free space, respectively.

Dear Wiccan readers: I understand modern Wiccans are not usually all about the curses and hexes. But Darth Vader was recently converted from Episcopalianism and he's still figuring it all out.

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

The AYB retro-return-date (Zero Wing Zero Hour) should be around AD 2021.

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

'Pour one out for precipitation data integrity,' I say, solemnly upending the glass into the rain gauge.

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

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

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

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

Blade Runner: Classic, but incredibly slow.

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

After decades of increasingly confused arguing, Pluto is reclassified as a "dwarf Pluto."

"Buddy, you trying to pull something? I can't buy this gold--all the electrons are missing. I could face serious charges!"

I first saw this problem on the Google Labs Aptitude Test. A professor and I filled a blackboard without getting anywhere. Have fun.

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

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

He also broke the streak that incumbents with websites are unbeatable and Delawareans can't win, creating a new precedent: Only someone from Delaware can defeat an incumbent with a website.

I'm sorry, but the author of this Facebook comment clearly believes you were.

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.

'There's also a spike on the Fourier transform at the one-month mark where --' 'You want to stop talking right now.'

Nowadays the only ones left that do anything are turtles.

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

Family going to bed at 10 PM is so much worse than jet lag.

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.'

They might make it past that first line of defense. For the second, you'll need some picture frames, a level, and a protractor that can do increments of less than a degree.

Living in the southern hemisphere was nice because I could jump extra high, but I like it here too. Besides, if I ever want to move back, I can just curl up in a ball and wait!

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

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

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

And it says a lot about you that when your friends jump off a bridge en masse, your first thought is apparently 'my friends are all foolish and I won't be like them' and not 'are my friends ok?'.

We should have you at the gate in just under two hours--two and a half if we get pulled over.

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

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

News networks giving a greater voice to viewers because the social web is so popular are like a chef on the Titanic who, seeing the looming iceberg and fleeing customers, figures ice is the future and starts making snow cones.

"röntgen" and "rem" are 20th-century physics terms that mean "no trespassing."

Want to feel old? The 'want to feel old?' factoid meme dates back to around 2011, closer to the Bush/Kerry election than to today.

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

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 like trying to make it as hard as possible. "I'd love to meet up, maybe in a few days? Next week is looking pretty empty. *witchcraft"

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*]

Even geology papers about Heart Mountain are like, "Look, we all agree this 'volcanic gas earthquake hovercraft' thing seems like it can't possibly be right, but..."

You can search it if you want, but you may want to skip the memories of your mom.

The worst is the Terrible Twos, when they're always throwing things and shrieking, "forsooth, to bed thou shalt not take me, cur!"

'But what's the buzz about the film?' 'We're hoping it's distracting.'

[Halfway to the Sun ...] Heyyyy ... what if this BALLOON is full of acorns?!

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

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

Earth's r_jf is approximately 1.5 light-days, leading to general relativity's successful prediction that all the frogs in the Solar System should be found collected on the surface of the Earth.

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

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

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

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

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!

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

'The light from those millions of stars you see is probably many thousands of years old' is a rare example of laypeople substantially OVERestimating astronomical numbers.

This xkcd.com update introduces a variety of new reading modes which can be activated through the menu below the comic.

Progress on getting shipwrecked sailors to adopt ICMPv6 has been slow.

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.

I also have an utterance. Less of an utterance and more of an incantation. Less of an incantation and more of a malediction. Less of a malediction and more of a Word of Power. Less of a Word of Power and more of an Unforgivable Curse.

If anyone calls you on any weird detail, just say it's from the Jedi Prince book series, which contains so much random incongruous stuff that even most Expanded Universe/Legends fans collectively agreed to forget about it decades ago.

We've learned that weird spacing and diacritics in the methodology description are apparently the key to good research; luckily, we've developed an AI tool to help us figure out where to add them.

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

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

I 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.

* Mad about jorts

Mr. Jones, watch out for Ms. Lenhart! She's from genus Photuris!

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

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.

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

All long help threads should have a sticky globally-editable post at the top saying 'DEAR PEOPLE FROM THE FUTURE: Here's what we've figured out so far ...'

Friends with detriments.

Blockchains are like grappling hooks, in that it's extremely cool when you encounter a problem for which they're the right solution, but it happens way too rarely in real life.

If androids someday DO dream of electric sheep, don't forget to declare sheepCount as a long int.

When we take into account the recent discovery of previously-unstudied history in the 1750s, this year may have been an outright loss.

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

It's early 2020. The entire country is gripped with Marco Rubio fever except for Alaska, which is freaking out. You're frantically studying up on etiquette and/or sexting.

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

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

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!

Speed limit c arcminutes^2 per steradian

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

'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'll be honest--the 1950s were a rough time for cycling.

Premature optimization is the root of all evil, so to start this project I'd better come up with a system that can determine whether a possible optimization is premature or not.

When I was a kid, I asked my parents why our houses didn't have toothpaste pipes in addition to water ones. I'm strangely pleased to see Amazon thinking the same way.

I'm reading a goddamn book, thank you very much.

Someday I'll be the first to get a Ph. D in 'Undeclared'.

Last week, we busted the myth that electroweak gauge symmetry is broken by the Higgs mechanism. We'll also examine the existence of God and whether true love exists.

WARNING: This item was aged by the same inexorable passage of time that also processes nuts.

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

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

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

He's kind of an asshole, when you think about it

[Political pundit on the ScrabbleTV News channel] "After four years of defying orthographic pressure, Joe ceded the top of the ticket to Kamala, who--after considering Josh, Mark, Andy, Roy, and Pete--picked Tim."

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

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

Welcome to the International Space Station Exclamation Point!

"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'm like the Terminator, except with love!

Fortunately, the charging one has been solved now that we've all standardized on mini-USB. Or is it micro-USB? Shit.

You can look at practically any part of anything manmade around you and think 'some engineer was frustrated while designing this.' It's a little human connection.

Do I get to remove letters entirely? Or just rearrange them? Because the 'k/c' situation is ridiculous. Look, we can make out whenever. This is *immortality*!

With a good battery, the device can easily last for 5 or 10 years, although the walls probably won't.

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

The Pioneer anomaly is due to the force of my love.

I've developed a more logical set of rules but the people on the chess community have a bunch of stupid emotional biases and won't reply to my posts.

Charles, I just talked to John and Mildred, who run that company selling seeds and nuts, and their kids with MOUTHS are starving!

$The exact cause of the phenomenon is unknown, but it's thought to be linked to atmospheric refraction and you getting a really cool car.$

'Why did you get into fluid dynamics?' 'Well, SOME planet has to have the coolest clouds, odds are it's not ours, and rockets are slow.'

I love the title-text!

I'm going to drive this Netherlands joke so far into the ground they'll have to build levees around it to keep the sea out.

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

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

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

"While I try to do my part to destroy the environment, I try not to focus too much on individual responsibility. By pushing for broad policy changes, we can collectively do far more damage to the biosphere than any of us could on our own."

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.

'Upgrade to the latest version of Adobe Flash player to view THIS content, bitch.' ::triggers detonator::

i love you

I'm looking forward to having to worry a lot less about covid, but wouldn't mind if we worried a little more about giving each other colds. Colds are bad!

"Even split between us, this will pay way better than the Jumanji sponsorship I came into the date with."

So what do we do when we get to base 10? Do we use A, B, C, etc? No: Numbers larger than about 3.6 million are simply illegal.

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.

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.

'I see you're in this mood again.' 'I am always in this mood.'

Sharks can occasionally travel short distances through air when pursuing prey, but their attenuation coefficient is pretty high.

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

I vaguely and irrationally resent how useful WebPlotDigitizer is.

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

I can't believe they wouldn't even let me hold a vote among the passengers about whether to try the loop.

After somewhere around 40 hours, there's no academic reason to go to the class. Only go for the hallucinations.

I once got to second base with a basketball player. She was so confused.

And when I think about it, a lot of "things I want to do" are just learning about and discussing new tools for tinkering with the chain.

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

1937-2020

Also no results: 1girl10000cups, 2girls(5+3i)cups, 65536girls65536cups, or 3frenchhens2turtledoves1cup.

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

Now, if it selectively kills cancer cells in a petri dish, you can be sure it's at least a great breakthrough for everyone suffering from petri dish cancer.

I know a lot of people hate these, but I prefer them to touchpads.

I found an old tape of this episode in my family's closet. Check the news section of the forums to see the clip!

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

Tag yourself, I'm "frayed."

I guess I should be signing stuff, but I've never been sure what to sign. Maybe if I post my private key, I can crowdsource my decisions about what to sign.

Juno mission data suggests that Jupiter actually contains Matryoshka doll-style nested copies of every other planet in the Solar System.

And of course I had to redo this like three times because I kept writing 'UNTIE'; I kept doing 'doing 'doing it wrong' wrong' wrong.

Grayton also proposed making college scholarships available exclusively to sexually active teens, amnesty for illegal immigrants who create room for themselves by killing a citizen, and a graduated income tax based on penis size. He has been endorsed by Tracy Morgan, John Wilkes Booth's ghost, and the Time Cube guy.

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

But instead of hitting the ocean, you should land in an overheating hot tub on a sinking cruise ship, sending it crashing through the floor into the burning engine room as the ship goes under.

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

BREAKING: Channing Tatum and his friends explore haunted city

dpkg: error processing package (--purge): subprocess pre-removal script returned error exit 163: OH_GOD_THEYRE_INSIDE_MY_CLOTHES

During the week, I research my character by living in his house and raising his children.

What an incredible smell you've discovered.

SUB[59]: The submission numbers for my accepted OEIS submissions in chronological order

Oh no, Murphy just picked up the razor.

Science joke. You should probably just move along.

And now I might never get to again.

Originally, the ceremony used a variety of rodents and mustelids, but over time most people agreed it made sense to standardize on a specific individual ground squirrel in Pennsylvania.

Actually, the fact that Mars is still orbiting safely over here means that it was technically an *Euler* apocalypse, not a Venn one.

Click and drag.

And the possibility of lucid dreaming just makes it that much more fascinating.

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

A human is a system for converting dust billions of years ago into dust billions of years from now via a roundabout process which involves checking email a lot.

If only I had asked 4chan for ideas for what I should do to prevent this!

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

This message brought to you by the Society of Astronomers Trapped on the Surface of a Sphere.

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.

Although right now I'm more excited about ESPRESSO's radial velocity measurements, so I'm listening to This Kiss, her song about measuring "centrifugal motion" on "a rooftop under the sky".

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

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

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

We're worried that a regular whale will get into a 30-foot-deep ocean trench section and filter-feed on all the tiny whales.

More generally, with great power comes great dEnergy/dt.

The vaccine stuff seems pretty simple. But if you take a closer look at the data, it's still simple, but bigger. And slightly blurry. Might need reading glasses.

Fermions are weird about each other in a standoffish way. Integer-spin particles are weird about each other in a 'stand uncomfortably close while talking' kind of way.

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

The growth rate of items per day may may seem absurd, but it's actually much less than the acceleration in the 12 Days of Christmas song.

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

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

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

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

I recently had someone ask me to go get a computer and turn it on so I could restart it. He refused to move further in the script until I said I had done that.

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

It's important for devices to have internet connectivity so the manufacturer can patch remote exploits.

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

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

There's also nothing in the TOSes that says you can't let a dog play baseball in the server room!

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

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

Far off to the right of the chart is the Helvetica Scenario.

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

'List of helicopter prison escapes' and 'List of sexually active popes' are both entertainingly long, but sadly there's no 'List of helicopter prison escapes involving sexually active popes.'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The inflection point was probably in late 1966 or 1967, so when Neil Armstrong flew to space on Gemini 8, plate tectonics was not widely accepted, but when he landed on the Moon three years later it was the mainstream consensus.

It will get within 9 or 10 Sun-diameters of the "bottom" (the Sun's surface) which seems pretty far when you put it that way, but from up here on Earth it's practically all the way down.

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!

Stay while I recount the crazy TF2 kill I managed yesterday, my friends.

I can't speak to the paper's scientific merits, but it's really cool how on page 10 you can see that their reference GPS beacon is sensitive enough to pick up continential drift under the detector (interrupted halfway through by an earthquake).

Here, if you know the number of days until the vernal equinox, I can point you to the theater using my pocket Stonehenge.

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

We're building on our earlier success getting web developers to pay to change the backslashes in our displayed payment URL to forward slashes.

Hang on, I just remembered another thing I'm right about. See...

And even when they're not distracted, they usually get kicked out for illegal under-the-net 'subduction spikes'.

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.

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

If you don't know where you are on Earth, the angle of satellite dishes can help constrain your latitude. If some of them are pointing straight up, you're probably near the Equator, right under the ring.

These neutrinos were freshly produced by a local source just 8 minutes ago

Though please do confirm that it's actually *me* on Klout first, and not one of my friends trying to get me punched. The great thing about this douchebag deadman switch is that I will never dare trigger it.

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

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

Knuth Paper-Stack Notation: Write down the number on pages. Stack them. If the stack is too tall to fit in the room, write down the number of pages it would take to write down the number. THAT number won't fit in the room? Repeat. When a stack fits, write the number of iterations on a card. Pin it to the stack.

I hear in some places, you need one form of ID to buy a gun, but two to pay for it by check. It's interesting who has what incentives to care about what mistakes.

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

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

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]

Carefully maneuvering the balloon down a mineshaft in an effort to break the OTHER altitude record

Everything is a cloud application; the ping times just vary a lot.

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.

This site requires Sun Java 6.0.0.1 (32-bit) or higher. You have Macromedia Java 7.3.8.1¾ (48-bit). Click here [link to java.com main page] to download an installer which will run fine but not really change anything.

My thighs have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord?

Eventual headline: 'University Researchers Create Life in Lab! Darkness, Faulty Condoms Blamed.'

Life is too short for man pages, but occasionally much too short without them.

The draw-by-repetition rule does a good job of keeping players from sliding a tile back and forth repeatedly, but the tiles definitely introduce some weird en passant and castling edge cases.

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

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

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

You can leave at any time through the door over there. It's a Louisville door, so you'll need to find a compatible knob. No, don't be silly, that one is a Lexington knob! Of course it won't fit.

Sometimes, I sit on top of parking decks and watch the sun rise. I feel like I should have a guitar or something.

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

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.

As the CoKF approaches 0, productivity goes negative as you pull OTHER people into chair-spinning contests.

Using a classic Timothy Zahn EU/Legends novel is bad enough, but at least the style and setting aren't too far off. If you really want to mess with people, try using Splinter of the Mind's Eye.

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

"My parents were both omnitaurs, which is how I got interested in recombination," said the normal human.

U+2A0B ⨋ Mathematicians need to calm down

I was almost fired from a job driving the hearse in funeral processions, but then the funeral home realized how much business I was creating for them.

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

And given how much of my stuff they go through, they definitely know where I live.

It only works a few times before you have to capsize the boat in a soap lagoon again.

Sweet unintersecting dreams!

The place I'd least like to live is the farm in the background of those diagrams showing how tornadoes form.

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

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

On the plus side, we definitely killed that cancer over there, even if we caused a bunch more everywhere else.

This discovery was key to his demonstration of regular/goofy symmetry violation, which won him gold in the theory portion of the X Games.

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

Our customers keep sending us their personal information, even though we've repeatedly asked them to stop. The EU told me I'm the heir to some ancient European throne that makes me exempt from the GDPR, but we should probably still try to fix that.

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.

And then it turns out they're both Tyler Durden.

My parents sent me to several years of intensive Kix test prep.

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

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

The only blood these contracts are signed in is from me cutting my hand trying to open the goddamn CD case.