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

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You didn't run a chemical analysis against the Shroud of Turin? Man, all that work for NOTHING.

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 ...'

I'm the Philosopher until someone hands me a burrito.

"We can do 0.33 or 0.34, but our payroll software doesn't allow us to--" "NO DEAL."

Theoretical physicist: At the Planck length, uncountably many.

What do you want me to do? LEAVE? Then they'll keep being wrong!

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

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.

They say if a mathematician doesn't do their great work by age eleven, they never will.

Mathematicians give a third answer on the vertical axis, "That question is poorly defined, but we have a sub-field devoted to every plausible version of it."

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

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

I am never going out to buy an air conditioner with my sysadmin again.

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

I would say time is definitely one of my top three favorite dimensions.

In the 90s, our variety radio station used the tagline "the best music of the 70s, 80s, and 90s." After 2000, they switched to "the best music of the 80s, 90s, and today." I figured they'd change again in 2010, but it's 2017 and they're still saying "80s, 90s, and today." I hope radio survives long enough for us to find out how they deal with the 2020s.

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

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

What's that? You think I don't like the Peters map because I'm uncomfortable with having my cultural assumptions challenged? Are you sure you're not ... ::puts on sunglasses:: ... projecting?

Hmm, they won't do in-flight delivery, so let's order a new first and second stage to our emergency landing site and then try to touch down on top of them to save time.

If you pick a low enough orbit, it gives you a lot of freedom to use a lightweight launch vehicle such as a stepladder.

"Okay, for the last time, the shot is free, so we can't--" "Shut up and take my money!"

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

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

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

I love how Google handles dimensional analysis. Stats are ballpark and vary wildly by time of day and whether your mom is in town.

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

I woke up to find that I had scrawled the last line of this sleepily on a sheet of paper on my desk. I shouldn't have listened to the 70's hit marathon on the way home from work the night before.

I was there, dude.

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

If you think the purveyors of DRM simply want to protect artists, check out chapters 13 and 14 in Free Culture, by Lawrence Lessig. Their goal is the elimination of all culture they don't control.

It slowly dawns on us that our parents knew exactly what they were doing.

He should be better soon -- now that the Apple Store is getting rid of DRM, Cory Doctorow will get rid of his Steve Jobs voodoo doll.

In sixty million years aliens will know humans only by a fuzzy clip of a woman in an Axe commercial.

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.

Careful mathematical analysis demonstrates small-scale irregularities in Gaussian distribution

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.

Every computer, at the unreachable memory address 0x-1, stores a secret. I found it, and it is that all humans ar-- SEGMENTATION FAULT.

They work even better if you take them with our experimental placebo booster, which I keep in the same bottle.

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

If you want to see the polling questions we agree on MOST, you can check out Chapter 24 of my book How To, where I got the Roper Center on Public Opinion Research to help me design the world's least electable political campaign platform.

President Andrew Johnson once said, "If I am to be shot at, I want Gnome Ann to be in the way of the bullet."

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.

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

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

It's just that I get nervous about heights.

Click and drag.

The #2 cause of astronomer hand injuries is trying to do vector math when the second axis points off to the right.

That was quicker than usual! The cabin's sprinkler system often makes it really hard to keep anything lit.

Sweet unintersecting dreams!

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

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.

Sorry to make you memorize this random string of digits. If it helps, it can also double as a mnemonic for remembering your young relatives' birthdays, if they happened to have been born on February 5th, 2018.

Why can't you have normal existential angst like all the other boys?

No two adjacent circles are the same color.

They're up there with coral islands, lightning, and caterpillars turning into butterflies.

Turning in other directions can be accomplished by using a magnetized centerboard and ocean currents, since a current flowing through a magnetic field induces a Laplace force.

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

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

This is probably the first projection in cartographic history that can be criticized for its disproportionate focus on Finland, Mongolia, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

The less common, even worse outcome: "3: [everyone in the financial system] WOW, where did all my money just go?"

It's a real accomplishment to mess up a ravioli recipe badly enough that the resulting incident touches all four quadrants of the NFPA hazard diamond.

'At least humans are better at quietly amusing ourselves, oblivious to our pending obsolescence' thought the human, as a nearby Dell Inspiron contentedly displayed the same bouncing geometric shape screensaver it had been running for years.

[audience looks around] 'What just happened?' 'There must be some context we're missing.'

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

In lieu of mapping software, I once wrote a Perl program which, given a USB GPS receiver and a destination, printed 'LEFT' 'RIGHT' OR 'STRAIGHT' based on my heading.

Despite having now taken three months longer than the airplane people, we're making disappointingly little progress toward the obvious next stage of vehicle: The Unobtanium-hulled tunneling ship from the 2003 film 'The Core.'

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

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

I can't believe Candles of Vienna caved to commercial pressure and added the Goku expansion.

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

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

Dear Reader: Enclosed is a check for ninety-eight cents. Using your work, I have proven that this equals the amount you requested.

I'm as surprised as you! I didn't think it was possible.

You can't stab Carl Kasell. He sounds all slow and stentorian, but he moves like a snake.

Oh no, they set up a roadblock which is just a sign with the entire 'Czech hedgehog' article printed on it.

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

Bugs are spin 1/2 particles, unless it's particularly windy.

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

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

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

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

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

That's a gneiss butte.

If it were a two or above I wouldn't be able to answer because it would mean a pause in the screaming.

The great thing is, the sentence is really just a reminder to the listener to worry about whatever aspects of the technology they're already feeling alarmist about, which in their mind gives you credit for addressing their biggest anxieties.

They actually started the reversed-text practice in 1977 -- not for ease-of-reading reasons, but because too many people were driving backward down the highway blasting the Star Wars opening theme.

We're underwater on our mortgage thanks to the low price of water.

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

I'm a solipsistic conspiracy theorist. I'm sure I must be up to something, and I will not stop until I find out what.

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

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

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

The Hammer + Captain Tightpants == Captain Hammerpants?

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

That's very exciting! The bad news is that it's a risk factor for a lot of things.

A left-handed sheet bend creates a much weaker connection, especially under moderate loads.

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!

Yes, it took a lot of work to make the cards and pieces, but it's worth it--the players are way more thorough than the tax prep people ever were.

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

This isn't an informational illustration; this is a thing I think we should do. First, we'll need a gigantic spool of thread. Next, we'll need some kind of ... hmm, time to head to Seattle.

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.

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

"Want to feel old?" "Yes."

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

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

The theory finally unifies cosmic inflation and regular inflation.

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

(It's the TMBG Dial-a-Song line, to save you some time.)

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

It's a myth that the Great Wall of China is the only human-made structure visible from space--there are LOTS of structures for us to feel self-conscious about!

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

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

Ever notice how there aren't as many thunderstorms now as there were when you were a kid? Much like 'the shuffle on my MP3 player has a bias', this is occasionally true but universally believed. Brains are so interesting!

*click* Let him know he's got a stain on his shirt, though.

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

Asimov's Cosmic AC was created by linking all datacenters through hyperspace, which explains a lot. It didn't reverse entropy--it just discarded the universe when it reached end-of-life and ordered a new one.

I wonder what percentage of not-obviously-busy people on the street would say yes to kite-flying with a stranger. This looks like a job for Science!

Right now it's a bicycle wheel, so we've had to move to lighter vehicles, but the reduced overhead is worth it. There was one week when a wheel of cheese got dangerously close to the first page, though.

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

If you get an 11/100 on a CS test, but you claim it should be counted as a 'C', they'll probably decide you deserve the upgrade.

Well, she's pretty hot.

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

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

So I'm a bad person.

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

These anomalies are known as Miyake events, named for the pioneering scientist who discovered them and was tragically devoured by a carnivorous tree.

CONFLICT OF INTEREST STATEMENT: The authors hope these results are correct because we all want to be cool people who are good at science.

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

Although not permanently.

My normal approach is useless here, too.

First person to bring me Wayne Coyne in a hamster ball gets a free t-shirt! He gets one too.

All I want is a secure system where it's easy to do anything I want. Is that so much to ask?

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

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

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

Dr. Fauci is not permitted to have a cat, because as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, his petting one would be considered giving aid and comfort to an allergen.

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

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

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

Stay warm, little flappers, and find lots of plant eggs!

Telescopes and bathyscaphes and sonar probes of Scottish lakes, Tacoma Narrows bridge collapse explained with abstract phase-space maps, some x-ray slides, a music score, Minard's Napoleonic war: the most exciting new frontier is charting what's already here.

Fuck it. I'm just going to Waffle House.

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

For some reason the water in my pool is green and there's a weird film on the surface #nofilter

Donate now to help us find a cure for causality. No one should have to suffer through events because of other events.

'We're shocked by the Notre Dame fire. Click for our tribute to--' [okay] 'Now that we're all staying at home these past few weeks thanks to this new coronavirus, we--' [okay]

'Smilodon fatalis' narrowly edged out 'Tyrannosaurus rex' to win this year's Most Badass Latin Names competition, after edging out 'Dracorex hogwartsia' and 'Stygimoloch spinifer' (meaning 'horned dragon from the river of death') in the semifinals.

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!

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

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

Scientists are also sexy, let's not forget that.

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

I still don't know how the police found my compound where I ran an illegal searchlight depot/covert blimp airfield/fireworks testing range.

I'm trying to prove that mathematics forms a meta-abelian group, which would finally confirm my suspicions that algebraic geometry and geometric algebra are the same thing.

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

SPIDER PSYCHOLOGY (21st Ed.) is a comprehensive overview of arachnoneurology, neuro-arachnology, forensic arachnology, neuro-arachnoneurology (the study of the brains of spider neurology experts), and arachnoarachnology (the study of too many spiders).

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

Do YOU remember the skylight being this big?

Starting a meta-leaderboard for tracking who holds the record for ranking behind the most distinct people on an online leaderboard.

After changing it back and forth several times and consulting with internet linguist Gretchen McCulloch, I settled on "ok" in my book How To, but I'm still on the fence. Maybe I should just switch to "oK."

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

They're limiting the playtesters to type A3 V stars, so the games will all end before the Sun consumes the Earth.

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.

At least I never gave her the root password.

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

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.

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

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

I figured that now that society has collapsed, I wouldn't need to wear clothes anymore, but apparently that violates some weird rule of quantum gravity.

I would never stoop to vandalism, but I'm not above discreetly deleting the occasional 'this article contains excessive amounts of detail' tag.

I've just received word that the Emperor has dissolved the MIT computer science program permanently.

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

It started as a mistake that everyone was afraid to admit to, and then it stuck because removing it 'looks silly.'.

There's always the hope that if you sit and watch for long enough, the beachball will vanish and the thing it interrupted will return.

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

This place has so many demonyms. Northlanders. Fair Folk. Honey Barons. Lake Dwellers. Treasurers. Swamp Watchers. Dream Farmers. Wellfolk. Rockeaters. Forgotten Royals. Remote Clients. Barrow-Clerks. The People of Land and Sky.

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

Some works didn't make the cut; in "Ecks vs. Sever" vs. the passage of time, the latter seems to have won pretty decisively.

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

It was actually canceled because they just noticed he's been naked under that coat the whole time. There's a petition on Facebook to get Fox to un-cancel it, and one on Livejournal to get him to take off the coat.

Luckily, the range is limited by the fact that the square boundary lines follow great circles.

I don't even *want* this package! Why did I join the stinging insect of the month club, anyway?

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.

Umwelt is the idea that because their senses pick up on different things, different animals in the same ecosystem actually live in very different worlds. Everything about you shapes the world you inhabit--from your ideology to your glasses prescription to your web browser.

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.

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

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

With reasonable assumptions about latitude and body shape, how much time might she gain them? Note: whatever the answer, sunrise always comes too soon. (Also, is it worth it if she throws up?)

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

Plus the reaction in the Tumblverse is always 'repeatedly get hit by a dog and fall down the stairs'.

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

This reminds me of that video where ... no? How have you not seen that? Oh man, let me find it. No, it's ok, we can go back to your video later.

I live on a torn-bag-of-potato-chips-where-the-tear-is-rapidly-growing fault, which is terrifying.

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

This PSA brought to you by several would-be assassins who tried to wave me in front of speeding cars in the last month and who will have to try harder next time.

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

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?

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

It's going in A collection of satellites skewered with pins and mounted in display boxes. Not necessarily MY collection.

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.

And over heeee[...]eeeere (i)s Saturn.

I take it Narnia doesn't have Cinnabons? Because if you can magic up a plate of those, I'll betray whoever.

After reading Slashdot and BoingBoing, sometimes I have to go outside.

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

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

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

They all made fun of Autometalogolex, but someday there will be a problem with Christmas that can only be solved if Santa somehow gets a serious headache, and then they'll see.

Works for any grocery or non-grocery. Even thyme is just H and time.

We're not trapped in here with the coronavirus. The coronavirus is trapped in here with us.

You can also try 'Yikes.'

Hang on, I've heard this problem. We need to pour water into the duct until the phone floats up and ... wait, phones sink in water. Mercury. We need a vat of mercury to pour down the vent. That will definitely make this situation better and not worse.

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!

The research was overseen by the Institutional Review Board, which is what I named my surfboard.

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

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

"Is the pipeline literally running from your laptop?" "Don't be silly, my laptop disconnects far too often to host a service we rely on. It's running on my phone."

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

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

An apple fell on Isaac Newton's head and gave him the idea that the moon might be a tasty apple, though this turned out not to be true--the Apollo program eventually determined that it was just a desolate and bland Red Delicious.

Hell if I know

Well, the kid's definitely getting the biology geek phenotype.

Ok, I've got it, just need to plug in my security key. Hmm, which way does the USB go? Nope, not that way. I'll just flip it and– OH JEEZ IT FELL INTO THE VENT.

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

General solutions get you a 50% tip.

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

Both too cautious AND not cautious enough: "I'm skeptical that those are aliens, so I'm going to try pulling off their masks."

I think I accidentally installed an Overton window in my bedroom. A few months ago, the sun wasn't in my face in the morning, but now it is.

My upcoming album, 'Linked List', has covers of 'The Purple People Eater', the Ninja Turtles theme, 'Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini', and the Power Rangers theme, with every song played to the tune of the next.

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.

Nothing personal, high schoolers.

'This HAZMAT container contains radioactive material with activity of one becquerel.' 'So, like, a single banana slice?'

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

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!

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.

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

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.

It's cool, it's totally ethical--they're all programmed to hunt whichever bird of prey is most numerous at the moment, so they leave the endangered ones alone until near the end.

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

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

Also, all financial analysis. And, more directly, D&D.

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.

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

You know that I'll never leave you. Not as long as she's with someone.

Once, long ago, I saw this girl go by. I didn't stop and talk to her, and I've regretted it ever since.

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

Whenever you see a video of birds doing something weird, remember: Birds are a small subset of dinosaurs, so the weirdness of birds is a small subset of the weirdness of dinosaurs.

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

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

I'd like 0.4608 apples, please.

After a pail of water was thrown on the Wicked Witch of the West outside Salt Lake City, Utah's Great Salt Lake was measured to be 7 parts per trillion witch by volume.

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.

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

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?

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

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

CIRCULAR VIDEO - PROS: Solves aspect ratio problem. CONS: Never trust anyone who talks to you from inside a circle.

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

I've looked through a few annotated versions of classic books, and it's shocking how much of what's in there is basically pop-culture references totally lost on us now.

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

What I really want is to hang out where I hung out with my friends in college, but have all my older relatives there too.

[Earlier, at the eye doctor] 'No, for the last time, the numerals on the paper aren't my prescription, it's the shape I want you to make with the laser.'

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

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

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

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

When it explodes, it will cast off its outer layers, leaving behind nothing but a slowly fading PalmPilot, calculator, or two-way pager.

Changes with this update: If you use the combined scan-shred function, it now performs them in that order instead of the reverse, saving a HUGE amount of CPU time.

When I began trying to form a new claim by stitching together these parts in such an unnatural way, some called me mad.

"One popular strategy is to enter an emotional spiral. Could that be the right approach? We contacted several researchers who are experts in emotional spirals to ask them, but none of them were in a state to speak with us."

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

this calculator implements the simple throwing distance estimation model from the how to throw things chapter of the book how to

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

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

Merry Christmas from xkcd!

That eggplant is in something of a flaccid state.

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

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

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

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

The articles are much shorter, but I assume that's because this version predates the merger with the Hawaiian text that created the modern Hawaiian-Greek hybrid wiki-pedia.

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!

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

DUCKLOOP'D?

Romantic comedy heroines, I'm talking to you.

I'm hoping 2022 is relatively normal because I don't know what symbol comes after the asterisk and the dagger.

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

ARCTANGENT THETA = ENCHANT AT TARGET

It's like the traveling salesman problem, but the endpoints are different and you can't ask your friends for help because they're sitting three seats down.

'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.

Hurricane forums are full of excited comments about central pressure and wind speed and comparisons to Camille and 1931 and 1938, with hastily-tacked-on notes about how it will be tragic if anyone dies and they hope it's a dud.

Really, the comforting side in most conspiracy theory arguments is the one claiming that anyone who's in power has any plan at all.

'I'm here to return what Prometheus stole.' would be a good thing to say if you were a fighter pilot in a Michael Bay movie where for some reason the world's militaries had to team up to defeat every god from human mythology, and you'd just broken through the perimeter and gotten a missile lock on Mount Olympus.

I have this weird thing where if I don't drink enough water, I start feeling bad and then die of dehydration.

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

The tumbleweed then tried to roll off into the sunset, but due to the Old West's placement north of the subtropical ridge, the prevailing winds were in the wrong direction.

Speed Limit: 45 MPH / Minimum: 65 MPH

Yes you are! And you're sitting there! Hi, kitty!

Oh, and, uh, if the Russian government asks, that submarine was always there.

Tired of waiting on hold? Use our website to chat with one of our live agents, who are available to produce words at you 24/7!

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

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

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

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!

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

If you'd just agree to hold your meetings in here, you'd have PLENTY of time to figure things out before the deadline.

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

J.J. Thompson won a Nobel Prize for his work in electricity in gases, but was unfairly passed over for his "An atom is plum pudding, and plum pudding is MADE of atoms! Duuuuude." theory.

100 years later, this story remains terrifying--not because it's the local network block, but because the killer is still on IPv4.

In the LotR map, up and down correspond LOOSELY to northwest and southeast respectively.

And I can't believe some places still use fax machines. The electrical signals waste so much time going AROUND the Earth when neutrino beams can go straight through!

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

Reductio ad absurdum fails when reality is absurd.

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

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.

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

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

I looked at some of the data dumps from vulnerable sites, and it was ... bad. I saw emails, passwords, password hints. SSL keys and session cookies. Important servers brimming with visitor IPs. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion, c-beams glittering in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. I should probably patch OpenSSL.

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.)

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

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

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

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.

Washable, though only once.

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

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

I'm just worried that we'll all leave and you won't get to come along!

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

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

Now that airlines have started adding wheel locks to their drink carts, less than half of flights have one accidentally fall out through the hole.

On the other hand, it took us embarrassingly long to clue in to the lung cancer/cigarette thing, so I guess the real lesson is "figuring out which ideas are true is hard."

Click to see a video of a modern bird using stability flapping during predatory behavior. It all fits! Also, apparently Microraptor had *four* wings? The past keeps getting cooler! (And there's more of it every day!)

It'd be great if some news network started featuring partisan hack talking heads who were all Federalists and Jacksonians, just to see how long it took us to catch on.

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

$1600 / 1386153BR 3BATH, MODERN SLIDING DOORS, GUEST ROOMS, GARBAGE DISPOSAL. FREE MANDATORY PARKING (ENFORCED). CONVENIENT TO ALDERAAN.

Fans eagerly await 2015's 'Space Fights: Power Gets Up', although most think 1999's 'Space Fights: The Scary Ghost' didn't live up to the hype.

Uh-oh.

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

Superman lies near the bird/plane boundary over a range of distances, which explains the confusion.

A tribute to Buttercup Festival

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(?).

"I think I'll pass. These days I have a hard time feeling comfortable in crowded bars with loud music and lots of shouting." --me, after the pandemic, but now for a second reason

I wish I knew how to quit this so I wouldn't have to quit you.

Certain hybrid events can only happen in certain locations where all the conditions are present; chasers flock to the area in and around Kansas known as tumbleweed-colliding-with-possum alley.

Do you need me to do a quicksort on the whiteboard or produce a generation of offspring or something? It might take me a bit, but I can do it.

'Grandpa, what was it like in the Before time?' 'It was hell. People went around saying glass was a slow-flowing liquid. You folks these days don't know how good you have it.'

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

There are two rules on this ship: Never gaze back into the projection abyss, and never touch the red button labeled DYMAXION.

Instead of bobcat, package contained chair.

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

James Cameron has said that he didn't know its song would be so beautiful. He didn't close the door in time. He's sorry.

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

You know how Einstein figured out that the speed of light was constant, and everything else had to change for consistency? My theory is like his, except not smart or good.

[20 minutes later] ", hi."

And then in a twinkling, a sound gave me pause / From the roof came the scratching of eight tarsal claws.

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

Good luck to Democrats in the upcoming Georgia runoff elections, and to the Google Sheets SREs in the current run-on elections.

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

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

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.

Your homeowner's insurance might cover it, but be sure to check the subductible.

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

NEGATIVE REVIEWS MENTION: Unreliable internet. POSITIVE REVIEWS MENTION: Unreliable internet.

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

Also known as the Black Mirror-Mythbusters scale.

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

The Wirecutter staff called the Herman Miller Siege Perilous "the most cursed product we've ever had to fight" and "nearly as immortal as it boasts."

It's hard to decide which simple machine system to invest in. DeWalt makes a great lever and inclined plane, but I hear Milwaukee's wheel-and-axles are really good.

Movies that I know word-for-word, part one

Small print: this schedule will eventually drive one stark raving mad.

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

'Your chitin armor is no match for our iron-tipped stingers! Better go hide in your jars!' --common playground taunt

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

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

How could anyone consider themselves a well-rounded adult without a basic understanding of silicate geochemistry? Silicates are everywhere! It's hard to throw a rock without throwing one!

10^13.4024: A person who has come back to numbers after a journey deep into some random theoretical field

It's made me way more excited about ferris wheels, subways, car washes, waterslides, and store entrances that have double doors with a divider in the middle.

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.

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.

Controls are a little hard to figure out.

Inigo/Buttercup 4eva <3

It comes with a certificate of authenticity, which comes with a certificate of authenticity, which comes with a...

Shoot for the Moon. If you miss, you'll end up co-orbiting the Sun alongside Earth, living out your days alone in the void within sight of the lush, welcoming home you left behind.

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

When advertisers figure this out, our only weapon will be blue sharpies and "[disputed]".

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

The Earth is, on average, located in the habitable zone, but at any given time it has a certain probability of being outside it, which is why life exists on Earth but is mortal.

After initial tests created a series of large holes in the wall of the lab, the higher-power Scanning Tunneling Tennis Ball Microscope project was quickly shut down.

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

I bet he'll keep quiet for a couple weeks and then-- wait, did you nail a piece of scrap wood to my antique table a moment ago?

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.

"This will take a while, which sucks, because I'm already so busy chiseling out igneous intrusions from rock formations and watching Youtube loops of the Superman fault-sealing scene over and over."

'Hey! Put her down!' 'No, it's ok! The next chance for me to be carried to a blood cauldron isn't until 2024!'

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

'Fucking ineffable' sounds like someone remembering how to do self-censorship halfway through a phrase.

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

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

ALERT: Human 910-25J-1Q38 has created a Youtube channel. Increase erratic jerkiness of flying by 30% until safely out of range.

I wonder how hard it would be to ride an electric scooter in a hamster ball.

Bald-faced hornets are only a 2 on the Schmidt pain index, so I shouldn't complain. The tennis ball ejected from the dryer exhaust vent could have ricocheted off the nest of a much higher-scoring insect before knocking me off the ladder. Really, I'm lucky.