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

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You do have to be careful, though--sometimes, instead of water, you hit this free fuel that you can sell for a lot of money instead.

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

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

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

Hipster CDC Reports Flu Epidemic Peaked Years Ago

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

For smaller numbers he has to SAVE lives. The birthrate channel is even more of a mixed bag.

When I was looking at the box, I should have thought more about what "360 degrees of freedom" meant.

A few minutes later, the goat from behind door C drives away in the car.

TinyURL was the most popular link shortener for long enough that it made it into a lot of printed publications. I wonder what year the domain will finally lapse and get picked up by a porn site.

You shouldn't look directly at a partial eclipse because of the damage that can be caused by improperly aligning the solar-lunar orbital plane with the orbital bones around your eye.

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

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

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.

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.

It's taken me 20 years, but I've finally finished rebuilding all my software to use 33-bit signed ints.

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

At first, I moved from pokémon posters to regular oil paintings, but then these really grumpy and unreasonable detectives from the Louvre showed up and took them all. They wouldn't even give me back my thumbtacks!

Googling inevitably reveals that my problem is caused by a known bug triggered by doing [the exact combination of things I want to do]. I can fix it, or wait a few years until I don't want that combination of things anymore, using the kitchen timer until then.

I sort of wish my texting app showed the percentage next to each person, but also sort of don't want to know.

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

Theoretical physicist: At the Planck length, uncountably many.

Sn = tin

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

To get more knowledge

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

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

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

We're firing you, but the online headline-writing division wants to hire you.

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

"There's one set of foot-p's cause I was totes carrying you, bro!" said Jesus seconds before I punched him.

I told her I'd take her address off the packaging if she'd stop submitting anonymous food safety complaints about my bakery to the health department, but she sent me a note that said NO DEAL along with an extra large batch of cookies.

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

Household tip: Tired of buying so much toilet paper? Try unspooling the paper from the roll before using it. A single roll can last for multiple days that way, and it's much easier on your plumbing.

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

"Or maybe, because we're suddenly having so many conversations through written text, we'll start relying MORE on altered spelling to indicate meaning!" "Wat."

My plane banner company gets business by flying around with a banner showing a <div> tag, waiting for a web developer to get frustrated enough to order a matching </div>.

ThisadpaidforbythecounciltopromoteMicrosoftandChristianity. Remember, The Bible is Closed Source.

Prank #11: Boston

Our flight gathered valuable data on whether a commercial airliner in the eye of a hurricane can do a loop.

Welcome to the International Space Station Exclamation Point!

In retrospect, I shouldn't have used each layer of the OSI model as one of my horcruxes.

"Wait, how often are you getting bitten by snakes? And why are you boiling water?" "Dunno, the CDC people keep showing up with complicated questions about the 'history of the property' and 'possible curses' but I kinda tune them out. At least one of them offered me the flu shot."

You know what happens when you assert--you make an ass out of the emergency response team.

Pronouncing [ṡṡċċḣḣẇẇȧȧ] is easy; you just say it like the 'x' in 'fire'.

Romantic comedy heroines, I'm talking to you.

Or so I hope?

'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.

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

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

Our phones must have great angular momentum sensors because the compasses really suck.

If at least one person has a nightmare about being swarmed by hundreds of mouse-sized dromaeosaurids, my work will have been done.

The only big difference I've seen is in colors. Where the regular text reads 'press red button', the braille reads 'press two-inch button'.

The establishment doesn't take us seriously. You know who else they didn't take seriously? Hitler. I'll be like him, but a GOOD guy instead of...

Let's get dinner after we promptly destroy all the X-7 we've manufactured.

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

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

This one is a little bland. Pass the saltshaker?

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

Staple guns: because duct tape can't make that 'kaCHUNK' noise.

Well, sex is like a velociraptor: despite your movie-fueled lifelong neurotic obsession, unlikely to be found in your house.

The key is portion control, which is why I've switched to eating smaller cans of frosting instead of full bottles.

When the results are published, no one will be sure whether to report on them again.

Unfortunately for her, real Star Wars fans are attracted to a gal with a good force choke.

I thought of another bad opinion! I couldn't find anyone who expressed it specifically, but still, the fact that I can so easily imagine it is infuriating! I'm gonna tell everyone about it!

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

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

I'd like 0.4608 apples, please.

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

When speaking out loud, you can can call it the 'Perseids meatier shower' and no one will ever know. (If you do get caught somehow, just tell them to Google the 'Kentucky meat shower' and that will distract them while you escape.)

I don't want to talk about it

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'.

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.

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

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

The Thirty Meter Telescope will be renamed The Flesh-Searing Eye on the Volcano.

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

The zoo takes special care to keep kings separated from opposite-color pieces as part of their conservation program to prevent mating in captivity.

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

To everyone who responds to everything by saying they've 'lost their faith in humanity': Thanks--I'll let humanity know. I'm sure they'll be crushed.

And nothing for 'I'm glad I saw Epic Movie.'

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

I WONDERED why he kept asking whether we thought the impact speed was too low.

I know they said this change is permanent, but surely when they hear how much we're complaining someone will find a way to change things back.

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

I ended up getting my tax return prepared at a local place by a really friendly pretrained neural net named Greg.

Some other studio should do the Antz/A Bug's Life thing and release The Dingbats Movie at the same time.

If we find one of those tire dumps, the next time he tries to get his truck back we can just retreat and let him have it.

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?

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).

That's my hat! You took my hat!

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

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

Not even metapneumovirus, easily the common cold virus with the coolest name, warrants our sympathy. Colds suck. No mercy.

Maybe there's no tenderness in her fingertips either, but at least SHE puts out.

Instead of bobcat, package contained chair.

We trained it to produce data that looked convincing, and we have to admit the results look convincing!

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

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

I like the idea of cartograms (distorted population maps), but I feel like in practice they often end up being the worst of both worlds—not great for showing geography OR counting people. And on top of that, they have all the problems of a chloro... chorophl... chloropet... map with areas colored in.

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

It's a linear extrapolation, Michael. How big could the error be? 10%?

Correlation doesn't imply causation, but it does waggle its eyebrows suggestively and gesture furtively while mouthing 'look over there'.

IT'S ALL REAL

The IAU is sad to announce that at 00:39 UTC on December 22nd, Jupiter and Saturn did unfortunately come into contact, and appear to have blooped together.

So glad Kate over in R&D pushed for using the AlgoMaxAnalyzer to look into this. Hiring her was a great decisio- waaaait.

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

Apple uses automated schnapps IVs.

They actually showed up on the first scan by the first WiFi-capable device.

If this were SMBC, the alt-text drawing thingy would be a giraffe hooker fluttering her eyelashes.

Man, I just wanted to know how babby was formed.

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

People ask me whether I feel any moral qualms about the source of the points, but if he hadn't introduced factory farming to Agricola, someone else would have.

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

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!

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

Tonight's top story: Lucifer, the Prince of Darkness, died in his home this morning at the age of [unintelligible rune]. Due to the large number of sharks inhabiting his former kingdom, no body could be recovered.

Deep in some corner of my heart, I suspect that real times tables are wrong about 6x7=42 and 8x7=56.

Functional programming combines the flexibility and power of abstract mathematics with the intuitive clarity of abstract mathematics.

Communication is one of the most popular ways to transmit information, ahead of rivals such as

[LIVE]

"This is the reference implementation of the self-referential joke."

Just yesterday I bought my first non-DRM'd songs (The Last Vegas, in keeping with my 'I only listen to things from Guitar Hero' theme).

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

169 is a baker's gross.

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

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

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

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

The US uses hollowed-out salt domes to store the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, and non-hollowed-out ones to store the Strategic Salt Reserve.

I asked them if it was safe to be running tours during the pandemic. They said, "During the what?"

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

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

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.

Maybe someday I'll get to write the Wikipedia article about this place! Wait, damn, original research.

I don't care whether you win or lose, as long as you have-- ...okay, sorry, I'm being reminded I very much care whether you win or lose. I need you to win, that's very important.

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

It's time to draw the line.

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

Sure, this exoplanet we discovered may seem hostile to life, but our calculations suggest it's actually in the accretion disc's habitable zone.

Hey! A bunch of the early Cretaceous fossils on each coast seem to have been plagiarized, too!

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

Blatantly banking on customers not understanding that it's like a Hollywood studio advertising that their new movie was 'watched by Roger Ebert'.

My brother had a ferret he loved which died since I drew this strip. RIP.

'Finding a 105-year-old who's lived in each location and asking them which hurricane they think was the worst' is left as an exercise for the reader.

If you're interested in the subject, Lawrence Lessig's 'Free Culture' is pretty good

It was tricky.

And I was kicked out of my March Madness pool because I wouldn't shut up about the evidence for NBA/ABA endosymbiosis.

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

Check check check ... chhecck chhecck chhecck ... check check check

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

At 8 drinks, you switch the torrent from FreeBSD to Microsoft Bob. C'mon, it'll be fun!

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

The plug fits really snugly, so it should be safe in a crash.

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.

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

Lifehacking!

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

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.

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?'.

The ISO 216 standard ratio is cos(45°), but American letter paper is 8.5x11 because it uses radians, and 8.5/11 = pi/4.

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

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

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

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

There has long been debate about Big Bird's species, with some experts claiming he was a canary, but recent genetic analysis places him firmly in Cariamiformes.

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

Wikipedia path: Virus -> Immune system -> Innate immune system -> Parasites -> List of parasites of humans -> Naegleria fowleri -> Primary amoebic meningoencephalitis -> Deciding I DEFINITELY shouldn't connect an aquarium pump to my sinuses

I wonder what year I'll discard the last weird food item that I bought online in early 2020.

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

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

Vertebrae Georg

Biology is really struggling; they're barely at 93% and they keep finding more ants.

There are two types of dichotomy: False dichotomies, true dichotomies, and surprise trichotomies.

WE WILL ARREST THE REVOLUTION MEMBERS [AT THE JULY 28TH MEETING][tab] "Cancel the meeting! Our cover is blown."

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

My New Year's resolution for 2014-54-12/30/14 Dec:12:1420001642 is to learn these stupid time formatting strings.

I am not making this rule up. Although my mom wants you all to know it made perfect sense at the time.

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

Of course, since their cautionary tale was reported in a print newspaper, no one read it.

If I'm such a god, why isn't Maru *my* cat?

"Hi, what you do is fly over a designated zone and detach the--" "WE'RE SORRY, THE MOBILE CUSTOMER YOU ARE TRYING TO REACH IS OUT OF SERVICE"

SEMI-PROTECT THE CONSTITUTION

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

If physics had a mafia, I'm pretty sure the BICEP2 mess would have ended in bloodshed.

My goal in life is to be personally responsible for at least one sports rule change.

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

Anyway, we should totally go watch a video story or put some food in our normal mouths!

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

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

The HVAC bill for installing the Gulf Stream was enormous.

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

We've met! I remember you when you were thiiiis tall! [*holds a hand an inch above their head*]

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

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

Did you base the saucer shape on pop culture depictions of aliens, or was that stuff based on your ships? Does the rotational symmetry help with ... hey, where are you going?

'Look to my coming on the fifth day. At dawn, look to the east.' 'And look to the west to see our shadows!'

Someday I hope to find a way to mess up a recipe so badly that it draws the attention of the International Air Transport Association, the International Mathematical Olympiad, or the NSA.

No matter how elaborately you fool yourself.

Markets have been rocked by a second day of uncertainty after someone set up a giant Ouija board on the NYSE wall controlled collectively by the movement of the stock tickers.

Not enough houses on your block? Just hit them at 30-year intervals from here to 2300 and get 10x the candy.

You can click to preorder to get a copy of What If? 2 when it comes out 9/13, assuming we all make it past the spider situation(?) on Tuesday(?).

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

Corollary to Hofstadter's Law: Every minute you spend thinking about Hofstadter's Law is a minute you're NOT WORKING AND WILL NEVER FINISH! PAAAAAANIIIIIIC!

College Board issues aside, I have fond memories of TI-BASIC, writing in it a 3D graphing engine and a stock market analyzer. With enough patience, I could make anything ... but friends. (Although with my chatterbot experiments, I certainly tried.)

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

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.

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

The universe long dead, IsaAC surveyed the formless chaos. At last, he had arrived at an answer. 'I like you,' he declared to the void, 'but I don't LIKE like you.'

But THIS guy, he might be for real!

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

I mean, what's more likely -- that I have uncovered fundamental flaws in this field that no one in it has ever thought about, or that I need to read a little more? Hint: it's the one that involves less work.

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

One of the things of bear spray says that, and I'm not one to disobey safety instructions, but there are no bears around here. Guess it's time for a camping trip where we leave lots of food out!

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

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

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

This one is from the Red Belt collection, of 'medium' difficulty.

If you shrank the Solar System to the size of Texas, the Houston metro area would be smaller than a grasshopper in Dallas.

It's okay, we can just feed the one-pixel image into an AI upscaler and recover the original image, or at least one that's just as cool.

The blueprints for the Department of the Internet offices call for Ceiling Cat-themed sprinkler heads.

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

I'm trying to be healthier, so after I eat this brick of cheese, I'll have a spoonful of grease-soaked vegetables.

Statistics suggest that there should be tons of alien encounter stories, and in practice there are tons of alien encounter stories. This is known as Fermi's Lack-of-a-Paradox.

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

Nearby, there were also no injuries when a multi-vortex tornado hit one of those spinning teacup rides.

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!"

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

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

Sci-fi has energy weapons because otherwise the people like me who watch it get distracted counting shots.

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

"That's ... unsettling." "Yeah, those definitely don't sound like the normal drea– ＬＡＴＩＴＵＤＥＴＨＲＥＥＦＩＶＥＰＯＩＮＴ..."

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

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

A death-first search is when you lose your keys and travel to the depths of hell to find them, and then if they're not there you start checking your coat pockets.

...an effect size of 1.68 (95% CI: 1.56 (95% CI: 1.52 (95% CI: 1.504 (95% CI: 1.494 (95% CI: 1.488 (95% CI: 1.485 (95% CI: 1.482 (95% CI: 1.481 (95% CI: 1.4799 (95% CI: 1.4791 (95% CI: 1.4784...

Man, this trick has saved me so many times.

This car has 240% of a horse's decision-making ability and produces only 30% as much poop.

Wavefunction collapse is only one interpretation. Under some interpretations, graduate students also have souls.

Checking whether build environment is sane ... build environment is grinning and holding a spatula. Guess not.

58% of the state has gone into plaid.

If you ever want to get beaten up by a bunch of graphic designers, try removing the serifs from Times New Roman and adding them to Comic Sans.

I'm waiting for the day when, if you tell someone 'I'm from the internet', instead of laughing they just ask 'oh, what part?'

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

'Now, minions, I'm off to inspect our shark cages.' 'Do you really need to inspect them this often?' 'PRISONERS MUST NEVER ESCAPE.'

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

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

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

Cloud computing has a ways to go.

==COSMOLOGY==> 'Uhhh ... how sure are we that everything is made of these?'

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

You know I've always hated her.

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

The ideal mix for maximum competitive cable-coiling energy is one A/V tech, one rock climber, one sailor, and one topologist.

Supercollider? I 'ardly know 'er!

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

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

RIP the surface of Mars

Proper User Policy apparently means Simon Says.

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.

Or perhaps they knew he was there, and were just trying to torment him first.

But then she does that thing with her tongue and I remember why I left you.

(1) That shopping cart is full of AirHeads, and (2) I died at 41 from what the AirHeads company spokesperson called 'probably natural causes.'

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

I was sure he was just getting revenge, but then he did the same thing to Carrie Underwood. Then he mailed me a scone. I think I'm giving up dating.

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

So excited to see everyone after my luxury cruise home from the World Handshake Championships!

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

Squaring the circle is really easy with some good clamps.

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

We haven't actually seen a star fall in since we invented telescopes, but I have a list of ones I'm really hoping are next.

Dinosaur Cosmics

There are some papers arguing that there's a volcanic component, but I personally think they're just feeling guilty and trying to cover the trail.

4. They unplug the root machine but the thousands of leaf VMs scatter in the wind and start spinning up new instances wherever they land

Two tips: 1) 8675309 is not just prime, it's a twin prime, and 2) if you ever find yourself raising log(anything)^e or taking the pi-th root of anything, set down the marker and back away from the whiteboard; something has gone horribly wrong.

Officer suspended from horse.

We once tried playing blindfold chess on the Aerosmith ride at Disney World.

"The committee appreciates that your 2020 launch is on track, but the 'human capital/personnel retention' budget includes a lot more unmarked cash payments than usual. What are th--" "Public outreach."

Blade Runner: Classic, but incredibly slow.

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

Son, don't try to play 'make you feel bad' with the Michael Jordan of making you feel bad.

I got lost and wandered into the world's creepiest cemetery, where the headstones just had names and star ratings. Freaked me out. When I got home I tried to leave the cemetery a bad review on Yelp, but as my hand hovered over the 'one star' button I felt this distant chill ...

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

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

The worst part is that's the millisigma interval.

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

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

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

LOOK, THE LATENCY FALLS EVERY TIME YOU CLAP YOUR HANDS AND SAY YOU BELIEVE

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

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

You can come on in, we're all fully vaccinated. Except the spare room off the living room. Don't go in there, we're not fully vaccinated in there.

It's totally a reasonable modern analogue. Jefferson would have been all about crypto.

Fun fact: if you say this every time a professor does something to a complex-number equation that drops the imaginary part, they'll eventually move the class to another room and tell everyone else except you.

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

"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."

"I've traveled here from the year 2020 to bring you this vaccine!"

𝓘 𝓽𝓱𝓲𝓷𝓴 𝓬𝓪𝓹𝓲𝓽𝓪𝓵 𝓛 𝓲𝓼 𝓹𝓻𝓸𝓫𝓪𝓫𝓵𝔂 𝓽𝓱𝓮 𝓶𝓸𝓼𝓽 𝓯𝓾𝓷 𝓽𝓸 𝔀𝓻𝓲𝓽𝓮, 𝓽𝓱𝓸𝓾𝓰𝓱 𝓵𝓸𝔀𝓮𝓻𝓬𝓪𝓼𝓮 𝓺 𝓲𝓼 𝓪𝓵𝓼𝓸 𝓪 𝓼𝓽𝓻𝓸𝓷𝓰 𝓬𝓸𝓷𝓽𝓮𝓷𝓭𝓮𝓻.

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

I started off with countless problems. But now I know, thanks to COUNT(), that I have "#REF! ERROR: Circular dependency detected" problems.

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

"Oh, and our computers all have cameras now, which is nice during the pandemic lockdowns." "The WHAT."

As of this writing, the only thing that's 'razor-thin' or 'too close to call' is the gap between the consensus poll forecast and the result.

This doesn't take into account the energy imparted by orbital motion (or gravity assists or the Oberth effect), all of which can make it easier to reach outer planets.

This was actually drawn years before Red Spiders

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

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

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

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

Cue angry letters from all seven fans of Xenocide.

Opening dialogue by Scott

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

I heard they might make the wild card game, which would be cool. Do you know when that is? I have a wedding next weekend, but if it's after that we could try to go!

Maybe we should give up on the whole idea of a 'back' button. 'Show me that thing I was looking at a moment ago' might just be too complicated an idea for the modern web.

Never bring tequila to a key-signing party.

The next day: 'What? Six bank robberies!? But I just vandalized the library!' 'Nice try. They saw your plate with all the 1's and I's.' 'That's impossible! I've been with my car the whole ti-- ... wait. Ok, wow, that was clever of her.'

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

If you're really savvy, you can hide an entire set of illicit transactions by timing them to draw what looks like a graph inset.

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

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

'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.'

They have to keep the adjacent rack units empty. Otherwise, half the entries in their /var/log/syslog are just 'SERVER BELOW TRYING TO START CONVERSATION *AGAIN*.' and 'WISH THEY'D STOP GIVING HIM SO MUCH COFFEE IT SPLATTERS EVERYWHERE.'

If it falls below 20% full, my bag turns red and I start to panic.

'We can also use middle names in place of first pet's names, but yours is something incomprehensible about dropping tables.'

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

The best place to be for a hug eclipse is a scenic natural area with good views and few clouds. The worst place to be is the lunar surface.

Plus, now I know that I have risk factors for elbow dysplasia, heartworm, parvo, and mange.

[Astronomer peers into telescope] [Jaws theme begins playing]

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

It's a beautiful day in the neighborhood!

While there's no formal regulation, it turns out their industry group is NOT one you want mad at you.

It's science!

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

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

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

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

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

It's important to teach yourself to feel responsible for random events, because with great responsibility comes great power. That's what my wise Uncle Ben told me right before he died; he might still be alive today if only I'd said rabbit rabbit that year!

Nothing personal, high schoolers.

Okay, I'm just gonna order pizza, and let's never talk about this again.

The weirdest quirk of the Borda count is that Jean-Charles de Borda automatically gets one point; luckily this has no consequences except in cases of extremely low turnout.

"Some people say light is waves, and some say it's particles, so I bet light is some in-between thing that's both wave and particle depending on how you look at it. Am I right?" "YES, BUT YOU SHOULDN'T BE!"

No other experiment has a lower false negative rate.

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

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

[Future update] Well, someone accidentally dropped an M&M in their cup of ice water, and we all panicked and scattered.

Obviously battery technology and prices have driven a lot of the scooter explosion, but I feel like Dean Kamen must be at least a little grumpy about how much people laughed at the idea of the Segway.

LIFEHACKS: You can just take all the luggage off the airport conveyer belt and leave with it. They don't check that it's yours at the door!

For the IPv6 map just imagine the XP default desktop picture.

But surely I owe you an accurate answer!

You can also try 'Yikes.'

It's crazy how much my gut opinion of a movie/song is swayed by what other people say, regardless of how I felt coming out of the theater.

Remember to only adopt domesticated drones that specifically request it. It's illegal to collect wild ones under the Migratory Drone Treaty Act.

Not actual size, except technically at one spot near the left.

The best part of crashing a Mars briefing is you can get in a full 11 minutes of questions before they can start to respond.

I started to do the tables for more famous people but it got really depressing and morbid and I had to go outside. Hat guy wins again.

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

It's easy to regret your awkward conversations but hard to regret the ones you didn't have.

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

The state has had so many contact tracers disappear into that shop that they've had to start a contact tracer tracing program.

But one of the regulars in the channel is a girl!

There are also a lot of global versions of this map showing traffic to English-language websites which are indistinguishable from maps of the location of internet users who are native English speakers.

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

This is roughly equivalent to 'number of times I've picked up a seashell at the ocean' / 'number of times I've picked up a seashell', which in my case is pretty close to 1, and gets much closer if we're considering only times I didn't put it to my ear.

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.

When I was a kid, someone told me the end of The Giver was ambiguous, which surprised me. I had just assumed Jonah died--because the book had a medal on the cover, and I knew grown-ups liked stories where sad stuff happens at the end for no reason.

If that fails, just multiply every number by a thousand. 'The 2nd St speed limit should be set at 25,000 mph, which would likely have prevented 1,000 of the intersection's 3,000 serious accidents last month.'

Squinting at a graph is fine for getting a rough idea of the answer, but if you want to pretend to know it exactly, you need statistics.

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

The end.

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

"I actually came in in the middle so I don't know which topic we're briefing on; the same slides work for like half of them."

It's hard to fit in the backseat of my flying car with my android Realdoll when we're both wearing jetpacks.

As the 'exotic animals in homemade aprons hosting baking shows' YouTube craze reached its peak in March 2020, Andrew Cuomo announced he was replacing the Statue of Liberty with a bronze pangolin in a chef's hat.

The best wedge issue is an actual wedge.

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

A good ²³⁸Umbrella policy should cover it.

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

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

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

'TMI' he whispered, gazing into the sea.

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

HACK THE STARS

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

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

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

Mal, Simon, Wash, Zoe, River, Kaylee, Jayne, Inara, Book.

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

Since buns range from crepuscular to nocturnal, it's recommended that you enable the scheduled "Do Not Disturb" mode on your phone to avoid being woken by alerts about Night Buns.

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

Except the people filtering in late are the partiers, so you end up with drunken makeouts in the living room and the next roommate to return home has to sleep in the hall lounge orbital.

What's weirder is that muons turned out to be INCREDIBLY cute.

This project actually inspired a two-hour powerpoint presentation that Al Gore gave around the country.

I had fun visiting the museum at Dover Air Force Base, unless they don't have a museum, in which case I've never been to Delaware in my life.

If history has taught us anything, we can use that information to destroy it.

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