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

Further research is needed to fully understand how we managed to do such a good job.

People may complain about readability, but even with jpeg compression, extracting the data points is usually computationally feasible if there aren't too many of them.

If you find an ash deposition layer from a year in which an eruption destroyed an island that had Camellia sinensis growing on it, you can make a Gone Island Ice_τ.

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?

Most chemists thought the lanthanides and actinides could be inserted in the sixth and seventh rows, but no, they're just floating down at the bottom with lots more undiscovered elements all around them.

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

Trust me, you don't want to get on the wrong side of the paramilitary enforcement arm of the International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service.

I'm going to tell the manufacturer that their business practices are ADMIRABLE and ETHICAL and their developers are ATTRACTIVE and I'm going to report them to the FCC for their IMPECCABLE VIRTUE.

In Rio de Janeiro in 2016, the same jump will get an athlete 0.25% higher (>1cm) than in London four years prior.

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.

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!

I ADMIRE HOW YOU SET BOUNDARIES AND I HOPE YOUR COLLEAGUES RESPECT THEM! PLEASE SPARE MY LIFE!

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

The Earth's five major mass extinctions were the Posh Extinction, the Sporty Extinction, the Scary Extinction, the Ginger Extinction, and the Baby Extinction.

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

It's amazing what it does for YouTube comments.

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

The bruises on my fingertips are my proof of work.

I don't know what's worse--the fact that after 15 years of using tar I still can't keep the flags straight, or that after 15 years of technological advancement I'm still mucking with tar flags that were 15 years old when I started.

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

Calling a cab means cutting into beer money.

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

According to my especially unsupervised K-means clustering algorithm, there are currently about 8 billion types of people in the world.

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 top computer champion at Seven Minutes in Heaven is a Honda-built Realdoll, but to date it has been unable to outperform the human Seven Minutes in Heaven champion, Ken Jennings.

Science tip: Scientists hardly ever use the two-dot division sign, and when they do it often doesn't even mean division, but they still get REALLY mad when you repurpose it to write stuff like SALE! ALL SHOES 30÷ OFF!

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

Bonus points if you can identify the science in question

Sure, T. rex is closer in height to Stegosaurus than a sparrow. But that doesn't tell you much; 'Dinosaur Comics' author Ryan North is closer in height to certain dinosaurs than to the average human.

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.

Due to a typo, I initially found a forum for serious Fleshlight enthusiasts, and it turns out their highest-end models are ALSO capable of setting trees on fire. They're impossible to use without severe burns, but some of them swear it's worth it.

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

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

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

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

Look, recipe, if I knew how much was gonna taste good, I wouldn't need you.

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

Wait, this is space -- how are you talking to me? And, as an afterthought, what's up with the hole in reality?

You also refuse to buy Cisco products because you hate the Thong Song, O. Henry, Deep Space Nine, freshwater whitefish, teenaged Incan emperors, Brak's brother, and vegetable-based shortening.

Fortunately, after a brief skirmish, I seem to have gained the upper hand in the battle against my internal organs, at least until they learn to read and find out the mean stuff I've said about them.

Once the air from the top passes below the plane of the wing and catches sight of the spooky skulls, it panics, which is the cause of turbulent vortices.

'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.

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

Remember, meteors always hit the tallest object around.

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

It's really hard to control the frequency, actually.

Blade Runner: Classic, but incredibly slow.

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

Single-elimination might provide more drama, but I think we can all agree that a comprehensive numerical scoring system will let us better judge the party's winner.

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

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

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

Theoretical physicist: At the Planck length, uncountably many.

Unfortunately, body size and bite force continue to increase.

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

Of course, you don't wanna limit yourself to the strict forms of the meter. That could get pretty difficult.

'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.'

That's actually the original Japanese version of A Million Random Digits, which is much better than the American remake the book was based on.

It does come at the small cost of a LOT more off-by-40-or-50 errors.

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

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

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."

Hang on, we got a call from the feds. They say we can do whatever with him, but the EPA doesn't want that laptop in the ocean. They're sending a team.

A tribute to Buttercup Festival

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

A term coined by my friend Beth

'Unfortunately, the notion of marriage which prevails ... at the present time ... regards the institution as simply a convenient arrangement or formal contract ... This disregard of the sanctity of marriage and contempt for its restrictions is one of the most alarming tendencies of the present age.' --John Harvey Kellogg, Ladies' guide in health and disease (1883)

The only winning move is to play, perfectly, waiting for your opponent to make a mistake.

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

Or a cabbage, for that matter. The goat makes sense. Goats are fine.

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

Certified skydiving instructors know way more about safely falling from planes than I do, and are way more likely to die that way.

'I don't know, why is your beret staying on your head?' 'Staples.'

The weird sense of duty really good sysadmins have can border on the sociopathic, but it's nice to know that it stands between the forces of darkness and your cat blog's servers.

"Want to feel old?" "Yes."

My bracket was busted in the first round; I had Massachusetts v. Connecticut in the final, probably in a case over who gets to annex Rhode Island.

It's just that I get nervous about heights.

Man, this emo shit was supposed to be for people who didn't have hats.

Our investigation into whining-based remedies became the first study to be halted by the IRB on the grounds that the treatment group was 'too annoying.'

You should start giving out 'E's so I can spell FACADE or DEFACED.

Haha, you'll see!

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

"The police told me I can't be a doctor, but whenever they show up I just go into the Google Maps settings page I found and change the house to 'Police Headquarters' and then they have to do what I say."

There were traffic jams for the eclipses in 1970 and 1979, and that was *before* we had the potential for overnight viral social media frenzies.

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

Both the skateboards I owned were pretty cheap and broke from heavy use; I'm gonna get a really nice one if I move to the city.

'Hey, everyone, you can totally trust that I didn't do a word count on MY edit!'

Several of the guests are secretly playing Meta Board Game Party. Every minute of parallel debate in the breakaway faction earns double victory points!

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

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

'DISPATCHING DRONE TO TARGET COORDINATES.' 'Wait, crap, wrong button. Oh jeez.'

If they're getting valuable enough stuff from you, at least the organized crime folks have an incentive to issue regular updates to keep the appliance working after the manufacturer discontinues support.

Getting the utility people to run transmission lines to Earth is expensive, but it will pay for itself in no time.

Every Roomba needs a dueling harness.

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

Look, you can't complain about this after giving us so many scenarios involving N locked chests and M unlabeled keys.

People get really grumpy when they realize you're giving them directions for how to go to the store and buy a GPS.

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

I looked up "insanity" in like 10 different dictionaries and none of them said anything like that. Neither did the DSM-4. But I'll keep looking. Maybe it's in the DSM-5!

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

Or whatever's handy! I'm pretty much pure alcohol and water, so it doesn't really matter!

The problem with perspective is that it's bidirectional.

"Wait, we've MOVED since 2010. How on Earth did--" "Look, some of us were just born to be champions."

A medicine that makes you put two dots over your letters more often is a diäretic.

Took me five tries to find the right one, but I managed to salvage our night out--if not the boat--in the end.

At this point, if we're going to keep insisting on portraying dinosaurs as featherless because it's "cooler", it's time to apply that same logic to art involving bald eagles.

Listen, I'm not a fan of the Spanish Inquisition OR predatory multi-level marketing schemes...

Thank you to linguist Gretchen McCulloch for teaching me about phonetic assimilation, and for teaching me that if you stand around in public reading texts from a linguist and murmuring example phrases to yourself, people will eventually ask if you're okay.

The Planck length is another thousand or two pixels below the comic.

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

Ma'am, I admit that wasn't in the best taste, but you have to admire my delivery! Ha ha, get it? Oh God, don't throw those syringes! Your baby's fine!

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

Anyone else watching this Youtube video in 1954? If so, my last trip definitely messed with the timeline.

The installation of the pipes on the inside of the insulation can be challenging, especially when the neighbor could come home at any minute.

I hate the unearthly sound my phone makes when the weather service issues a tornado harbinger.

1. Flatten the curve. 2. Steepen the curve. 3. Hang out.

Unlike an Iron Age collapse, a Bronze Age collapse releases energy, since copper and tin are past the iron peak on the curve of binding energy.

And the whole setup is just a trap to capture escaping logicians. None of the doors actually lead out.

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

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

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

All our teams make an effort to stay optimistic, but I will say that once our virus division saw the vaccine efficacy data, they started asking for payment up front.

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

"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."

Since it sounds like your time spent typing can't possibly be less productive than your time spent not typing, have you tried typing SLOWER?

The flags were probably vaporized on impact, because we launched it before we had finished figuring out how to land. That makes sense from an engineering standpoint, but also feels like a metaphor.

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

So he's saying that God thought Hitler's art was so bad that the Holocaust was an acceptable alternative. It's no secret that the hat guy is closely based on Aram, from Men in Hats.

Dot Tumblr Dot Com, on the other hand, would be an awful name for a band, if only because of how hard it would be to direct people to your band's website.

By the third trimester, there will be hundreds of babies inside you.

Although not permanently.

Now that I've finally gotten an electric vehicle, I'm never going back to an acoustic one.

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

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

They're really the worst tech support team. And their solutions are always the same. "This OS X update broke something." "LET'S INFILTRATE APPLE BY MORPHING APPLES!"

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

Scientists occasionally invent alternative periodic table layouts, which is usually a sign that they don't have enough enrichment in their enclosures.

Can you pass the nackle?

A technology that is '20 years away' will be 20 years away indefinitely.

Other high scorers are melt-in-your-hand aluminum-destroying gallium and tritium-powered glowsticks. Lawn darts are toward the other end.

Vanilla Ice was produced in small quantities for years, but it wasn't until the 90s that experimenters collaborated to produce a sample that could survive at room temperature for several months.

Not only is that terrible in general, but you just KNOW Billy's going to open the root present first, and then everyone will have to wait while the heap is rebuilt.

The biggest I've seen in a published source in the wild is an 80-fold error in a reported distance, which I think came from a series of at least three unit conversions and area/length misinterpretations.

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.

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

You can identify them ahead-of-time -- they lead with their left foot when the music starts.

This one is a little bland. Pass the saltshaker?

I should make a list of all the things I could be trying to optimize, prioritized by ... well, I guess there are a few different variables I could use. I'll create a spreadsheet ...

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

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

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

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

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

The test didn't (spoiler alert) destroy the world, but the fact that they were even doing those calculations makes theirs the coolest jobs ever.

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

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!

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

DUCKLOOP'D?

If you click on the post, it takes you to search results for the note on various online music stores.

Take me down to the paradise municipality / where the grass is mauve and the girls aren't fromthisreality.

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

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

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

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

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

2031: Google defends the swiveling roof-mounted scanning electron microscopes on its Street View cars, saying they 'don't reveal anything that couldn't be seen by any pedestrian scanning your house with an electron microscope.'

My hobby: Pretending to miss the sarcasm when people show off their lack of interest in football by talking about 'sportsball' and acting excited to find someone else who's interested, then acting confused when they try to clarify.

Cloud computing has a ways to go.

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

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

We lost the documentation on quantum mechanics. You'll have to decode the regexes yourself.

The debate over the correct Messier number for the Ship of Theseus is ongoing.

Biologically speaking, what we call a 'snake' is actually a human digestive tract which has escaped from its host.

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

Unless the next line is, "After we broke up, she blamed the painting and spent years planning her revenge, so my sorrow is mixed with relief that the dogs at least denied her that triumph."

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

I'm like a prisoner in Plato's Cave, seeing only the shade you throw on the wall.

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.

This happens in geek circles every so often. The 'Hey, this is just a system I can figure out easily!' is also a problem among engineers first diving into the stock market.

Goldilocks' discovery of Newton's method for approximation required surprisingly few changes.

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 ...'

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

Of course, I sort all my bookshelves the normal way, alphabetically (by first sentence).

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

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.

Forever comparing, never evaluating on any external scale. If you were a sort function, you'd never break the nlogn barrier.

To motivate it to fire its harpoons hard enough, Rosetta's Philae lander has been programmed to believe it is trying to kill the comet.

Cesium-133, let it be. Cesium-134, let it be even more.

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.

If you want to be extra safe, check that there's a big block of jumbled characters at the bottom.

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

After some account issues, we've added 6 new people from the beach house rental website support forum.

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

David did this

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

If you ever see someone using a capital xi in an equation, just observe them quietly to learn as much as you can before they return to their home planet.

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

I've had countless nights where the line never left the bottom zone of the graph, but the few moments where it's climbed all the way to the top have made up for them all.

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

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

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

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.

Some surfaces may seem difficult to glue. But if you research the materials, find tables of what adhesives work on them, and prepare your surfaces carefully, you can fail to glue them in a fun NEW way that fills your house with dangerous vapors.

I'm currently in the I Have Cheese phase of this cycle.

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

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

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

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...

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

A breadth-first search makes a lot of sense for dating in general, actually; it suggests dating a bunch of people casually before getting serious, rather than having a series of five-year relationships one after the other.

I'm proud to announce that as of this year I've become a world-class expert at chewing.

No, wait, come back! I want to be friends at you!

I actually remember being entertained by both the sequels while in the theater. They just don't hold up nearly as well in later comparison.

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

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

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).

[five years later] Ok, it seems we were accidentally zoomed in slightly too far. But imagine there's a cool-looking twisted accretion disc just outside this black square!

I don't understand the things you do, and you therefore may represent an interaction with the quantum vacuum virtual plasma.

Romantic comedy heroines, I'm talking to you.

Ugh, and we JUST went through this yesterday with javelin.

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

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.

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

If you ask it to please turn off that feature, it apologizes a whole bunch and promises to try to be quieter, then switches to a slightly lower-volume version of the clip with "sorry!" after the louder sounds.

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.

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

For the moment it's a standoff

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

But the rind is where all the vitamins are!

They're robust against quantum attacks because it's hard to make a quantum system that large.

'Which one?' 'I dunno, it's your house. Just check each object.' 'Check it for *what*?' 'Whether it looks like it might have touched a paper towel at some point and then forgotten to let go.' '...' 'You can also Google to learn how to check which things are using which resources.' 'You know, I'll just leave the towel there and try again tomorrow.'

I don't see why everyone is so hungry for BAD news, but fine, I'll give in to feedback and add a dark mode.

'Barack Obama is much less likely than the average cat to jump in and out of cardboard boxes for fun' is low precision, but I'm not sure about the accuracy.

That shirt looks good on you, but it would look even better stuffed into the neck of a vodka bottle and flung burning through our office building's window. Let's fucking do it and never look back.

I'm an H⁺ denier, in that I refuse to consider loose protons to be real hydrogen, so I personally believe it stands for 'pretend'.

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

I felt so clever when I found a way to game the Fitocracy system by incorporating a set of easy but high-scoring activities into my regular schedule. Took me a bit to realize I'd been tricked into setting up a daily exercise routine.

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

I always hate dragging around the larger archipelagos, but I appreciate how the Scandinavian peninsula flexes outward to create a snug pocket for Britain and Ireland.

You can just see his dejection as he realizes he's the lead guitar in 'Hedgeclipper'

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

The Credible Machine

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

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

HACK THE STARS

The academic archaeology establishment is suppressing my breakthroughs because of the disruption it would bring to their prepared-core flake-based toolmaking industry.

1. Nf3 ... ↘↘↘ 2. Nc3 ... ↘↘↘ 0-1

The only effect on the history books were a few confusing accounts of something called 'Greek fire.'

To be fair, the braised and confused newt on a bed of crushed Doritos turned out to be delicious.

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.

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

I was thinking of observing stars to verify Einstein's theory of relativity again, but I gotta say, that thing is looking pretty solid at this point.

This plan may sound appealing to people who know a little about the immune system, but the drawbacks are clear to people who know a lot about the immune system and also to people who don't know anything about it.

Okay, this eclipse will only be visible from the Arctic in February 2063, when the sun is below the horizon, BUT if we get lucky and a gigantic chasm opens in the Earth in just the right spot...

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

Seriously considering buying some illegal drugs to try to turn them back into cold medicine.

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.

It's like they say, you gotta fight fire with clichés.

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

Update: It turns out the cannon has a motorized base, and can make holes just fine using the barrel itself as a battering ram. But due to design constraints it won't work without a projectile loaded in, so we still need those drills.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

This well-known effect has of course been replicated in countless experiments.

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

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'.

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

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

Oh, wait, I might've had it set to kph instead of mph. But that would make the discrepancy even wider!

If Google Maps stops letting you navigate to (Clay County District) A in West Virginia, you can try Jump, OH -> Ina, IL -> Big Hole, TX.

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.

Here at CompanyName.website, our three main strengths are our web-facing chairs, our huge collection of white papers, and the fact that we physically cannot die.

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.

The universe started in 1970. Anyone claiming to be over 38 is lying about their age.

i love you

Presented in partnership with Qualcomm, Craigslist, Whirlpool, Hostess, LifeStyles, and the US Chamber of Commerce. Manufactured on equipment which also processes peanuts. Price includes 2-year Knicks contract. Phone may extinguish nearby birthday candles. If phone ships with Siri, return immediately; do not speak to her and ignore any instructions she gives. Do not remove lead casing. Phone may attract/trap insects; this is normal. Volume adjustable (requires root). If you experience sudden tingling, nausea, or vomiting, perform a factory reset immediately. Do not submerge in water; phone will drown. Exterior may be frictionless. Prolonged use can cause mood swings, short-term memory loss, and seizures. Avert eyes while replacing battery. Under certain circumstances, wireless transmitter may control God.

ERRORS: HAIR JAM. COLOR-SAFE CONDITIONER CARTRIDGE RUNNING LOW. LEGAL-SIZE HAIR TRAY EMPTY, USING LETTER-SIZE HAIR ONLY.

The Lord of the Rings sequel, set years after the Ring hubbub has died down, is just Samwise discreetly creeping back to Bag End to finish dropping the eaves.

Because they orbit the Earth every 90 minutes, some astronauts should try to argue that, due to CDC regulations and time zone technicalities, they should be able to get their second dose just 30 or 40 hours after their first.

At least they're not alone down there.

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

There's an intersection I drive through sometimes that has a forward green arrow, a red light, and a 'no turns' sign all on one pole. I honestly have no idea what it's telling me to do.

We have this conversation at least once a day in my apartment

When Pope Gregory XIII briefly shortened the light-year in 1582, it led to navigational chaos and the loss of several Papal starships.

And now I might never get to again.

Even the powerful, tart Granny Smith cultivar is proving ineffective against new Gran-negative doctors.

There was no alt-text until you moused over

I vaguely and irrationally resent how useful WebPlotDigitizer is.

Washington, DC: Eastern gray squirrel, Amur honeysuckle. Puerto Rico: Crested anole, sea grape. US as a whole: Mallard, eastern poison ivy.

If you're lying in bed tonight and you see yellow eyes glinting in your window, are you being stalked by a puma, a mountain lion, a panther, a catamount, or a cougar? Trick question--in North America, they're all names for the same species, Puma concolor! Isn't learning fun? Anyway, sleep tight!

Call me, MAYBE.

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

I've never been that big of a hug person, but it turns out I'm not quite this small of a hug person either.

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

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

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

$We didn't even get to the continued fractions!$

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

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

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!

[title-text similarly alphabetized]

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

The fifth panel also applies to postmodernists.

I THINK EVERYONE INVOLVED HERE IS CUTE.

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

Texting should work. Unless the message is too long, in which case it gets converted to voicemails, and I think I'm locked out of my voicemail.

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

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

"This seems more like a way to attract turkey vultures." "My mom always told me a turkey vulture is just a friend you haven't met yet, usually because you don't smell enough like decaying meat."

The rare compound solar-lunar-nephelogical eclipse

Eno's storied aria was once soloed by Judge Lance Ito on the alto oboe at Ohio's AirAsia Arena.

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

I have a thing for corrupt women.

There's a version that shows the planets with no cropping, but it's hard to find a display that supports it.

Maybe if I put it in a box for a while with a speaker playing some pleasant pastoral music, I can reprogram it.

My Redwall/Jurassic Park crossover fanfic is almost complete!

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

This really is a true story, and she doesn't know I put it in my comic because her wifi hasn't worked for weeks.

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

Did you shoot a man in Reno? Now, I don't mean to pry.

It says to cut the onions into 1/4" slices, but I'd better correct for length contraction.

YEEEEEEAAAAAAHHHHHH!

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

The universe fandom is great. Such sweet and enthusiastic people.

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

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.

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.

Directions from CITY OF TROY to ITHACA / Total time: 10y 54d 14h 25m / Warning: Route crosses an international border / route includes capture by the goddess Calypso / route includes a ferry

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

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

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

It's going to be weird near the end of May when the screen goes blank for over 18 hours.

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

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

At least if you're really into, like, Turkish archaeology, store clerks aren't like 'hey, how 'bout those Derinkuyu underground cities!' when they're trying to be polite.

Ever notice how the more successful observational comics become, the more their jokes focus on flying and hotels?

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

The arbiter gave my knight a red card for capturing with cleats up :(

If you Huffman-coded all the 'random' things everyone on the internet has said over the years, you'd wind up with, like, 30 or 40 bytes *tops*.

Building codes in hurricane zones rely on studies of how easily flying debris can break residential windows. If you're looking for a science fair project idea and you hate your neighbors, I'm sure they could always use more data!

Our new video ad campaign has our product's name shouted in the first 500 milliseconds, so we can reach the people in adjacent rooms while the viewer is still turning down the volume.

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

I went to a dinner where there was a full 10 minutes of Holy Grail quotes exchanged, with no context, in lieu of conversation. It depressed me badly.

There's also a Katamari level where everything is just slightly bigger than you, and a Mario level with a star just out of reach.

This dating is corroborated by the presence of stone tools at the site, rather than earlier and less effective helium ones.

ThisadpaidforbythecounciltopromoteMicrosoftandChristianity. Remember, The Bible is Closed Source.

Within a few minutes, our roads will be full of uncontrollably-swerving cars and our skies full of Amazon delivery dogs.

The ten-year cancerversary is traditionally the Cursed Artifact Granting Immortality anniversary.

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

100he100k out th1s 1nno5at4e str1ng en100o501ng 15e been 500e5e50op1ng! 1t's 6rtua100y perfe100t! ...hang on, what's a "virtuacy"?

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

Doing great here in the sixth and hopefully final year of the 2016 election.

Hipster CDC Reports Flu Epidemic Peaked Years Ago

It's ok, I still have some nice, cool gas clouds that aren't collapsing. As long as nothing ionizes them, I can continue to enjoy their ... HEY! NO!!!

"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

There's data suggesting that this model may apply to deep-dish/thin-crust pizza. I've designed a thorough multi-year study to investigate this personally, but funding organizations keep denying my grant requests.

Visual checks suggest the cool bird has exited the launch zone. Tip the rocket sideways and resume the countdown--we're gonna go find it!

I also managed to improve the solution for n=1 to s<0.97, and with some upgrades I think I can hit 0.96.

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

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

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

[later] I'm pleased to report we're now identifying and replacing hundreds of outdated metrics per hour.

If you think THAT'S unethical, you should see the stuff we approved via our Placebo IRB.

If you fire a Portal gun through the door of the wardrobe, space and time knot together, which leads to a frustrated Aslan trying to impart Christian morality to the Space sphere.

( MSTE ( AR ) CD )

"...just got back and didn't see your message until just now. Sorry! -- TIME THIS MESSAGE SAT HALF-FINISHED IN DRAFTS FOLDER: 3 days, 2 hours, 45 minutes."

'Garbage In, Garbage Out' should not be taken to imply any sort of conservation law limiting the amount of garbage produced.

Oh, your brother is Luke. Sorry, should've mentioned that first.

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

Fortunately, the internet has a virtually inexhaustible supply of code that doesn't work and people who are wrong, which bodes well for a return to normalcy. [Note: Click to read context for the cancer comics. She's doing well.]

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

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

I'd like to see more damage assessments for hurricanes hitting New York and flooding Manhattan -- something like the 1938 Long Island Express, but aimed a bit more to the west. It's just a matter of time.

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

I still think the Cold Stone Creamery partnership was a good idea, but I should have asked before doing the first market trials during the cryogenic mirror tests.

They're continuing to search for a square with the same area as the circle, as efforts to construct one have run into difficulties.

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

They'd use that Futurama episode with Fry's dog, but even spambots cry at that.

Some engineer out there has solved P=NP and it's locked up in an electric eggbeater calibration routine. For every 0x5f375a86 we learn about, there are thousands we never see.

I'm on the USPS No Fly List

Someone get that Pachelbel's Canon kid a recording contract, stat.

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

The most ridiculous offender of all is the sudoers man page, which for 15 years has started with a 'quick guide' to EBNF, a system for defining the grammar of a language. 'Don't despair', it says, 'the definitions below are annotated.'

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

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

wtfw it's like smho tbfh, imdb.

NOTIFICATION: Now dismissing a head of the Notification Hydra… NOTIFICATION: Success! You have dismissed a head of the Notification Hydra!

There was a schism in 2007, when a sect advocating OpenOffice created a fork of Sunday.xlsx and maintained it independently for several months. The efforts to reconcile the conflicting schedules led to the reinvention, within the cells of the spreadsheet, of modern version control.

They originally came here to try to investigate our chemtrail technology, and got increasingly frustrated when all their samples turned out to just be water ice with trace amounts of jet exhaust.

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.

Depending what corners of the internet you hang out on, 'regular' may at times awkwardly coexist with 'sexy.'

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

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

"The name wasn't a tip-off?" "Honestly, at first I thought you were saying 'Juneau'. A gravity assist seemed like a weird way to get to Alaska, but I figured it must be more efficient or something."

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