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

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They may technically have been softwoods at some point, but they definitely aren't now.

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...

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

Don't turn it on.

The git vehicle fleet eventually pivoted to selling ice cream, but some holdovers remain. If you flag down an ice cream truck and hand the driver a floppy disk, a few hours later you'll get an invite to a git repo.

I recently learned something that solved a mystery that had bugged me since childhood--why, when I looked at an analog clock, the hand would sometimes seem to take a couple seconds to start ticking. Google "stopped clock illusion".

We were going to do a falling-apart Rubik's cube that was just 27 independent blocks stuck together with magnets, but then we realized it was actually really cool and even kind of worked, so we cut that one.

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

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.

Prediction for Carlsen v. Anand: ... 25. Qb8+ Nxb8 26. Rd8# f6 27. "... dude." Qf5 28. "The game is over, dude." Qxg5 29. Rxe8 0-1 30. "Dude, your move can't be '0-1'. Don't write that down." [Black flips board]

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

This comic shows estimated average frequency. I wanted to include the pitch drop experiment, but it turns out the gif format has some issues with decade-long loops.

If you must know, I'm currently researching how to save this emailed tax form as a regular PDF so I can print and sign it. Our work isn't a lock for the Nobel, but we're in the running.

Replace the pendulums with history students and you'll qualify for a grant!

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

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."

OCEAN PLAY AREA RULES: No running, no horseplay, no megatsunamis, and no trying to pry the wreck of the Titanic off the bottom.

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

Although ... who else can't wait for them to incorporate that Wiimote head-tracking stuff into games? Man, the future's gonna be *awesome*.

"Crowdsourced steering" doesn't sound quite as appealing as "self driving."

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

As of this writing, Ubuntu 6.10 and Firefox 2.0 have left my computer a complete mess.

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

CLARIFICATION: By 9/13, I mean September 13th, not the 9th day of Jancember, the cursed 13th month that exists between December and January in the transdimensional temporal plane.

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.

Completely implausible? Yes. Nevertheless, worth keeping a can of shark repellent next to the bed.

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

Oh no, a musician just burst in through the door confidently twirling a treble clef.

m-x machineofdeath-mode

<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.]

Things are looking good for the eclipse--Nate Silver says Earth will almost definitely still have a moon in August.

'At the stroke of midnight, your brother will be hurtling sideways at an altitude of 150 meters' is a regular physics prediction about your nonmagical trebuchet, whereas 'you are cursed to build a brother-launching trebuchet' falls out of the Lagrangian.

'Drama' is just 'people being upset', when someone says they're always surrounded by drama and they just ignore it, it starts to make sense that their strategy might be backfiring.

This year, our team took home the dark blue ribbon, better than the midnight blue we got last year but still short of the winning navy blue.

'TMI' he whispered, gazing into the sea.

When you worry that you're missing out on something by not making both choices simultaneously by quantum superposition, that's called phomo.

"It's a little low for a weather balloon; it might be some other kind." "Yeah. Besides, I know I'm the alien conspiracy guy, but come on--the idea that the government would care about hiding something so mundane as atmospheric temperature measurement is too ridiculous even for me."

According to a new paper published in the journal Science, reporters are unable to thrive in an arsenic-rich environment.

I've lived in the present for my whole life and I'm not about to move now.

It's important to keep the spider from touching your face.

We actually stand around the antivirus displays with the Mac users just waiting for someone to ask.

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

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

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

"I wish for everything in the world. All the people, money, trees, etc." "Are you SURE you--" "And I want you to put it in my house."

The chemistry experiment had me figuratively -- and then shortly thereafter literally -- glued to my seat.

They often use ball lenses to collect light at the ends of optical fibers, so when you look stuff up on the internet you're actually scrying through a crystal ball.

Researchers claim to have synthesized six additional elements in the second row, temporarily named 'pentium' through 'unnilium'.

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

To anyone who understands information theory and security and is in an infuriating argument with someone who does not (possibly involving mixed case), I sincerely apologize.

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.

Nonrewritable tape?

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.

Qua qua qua is the sine qua non of sine qua non qua sine qua non.

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.

Also on the agenda: what's with his hips?

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

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

I'll never install a smart home smoke detector. It's not that I don't trust the software--it's that all software eventually becomes email, and I know how I am with email.

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

Wow, rude of you to regift literally every gift that you or anyone else has ever received.

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.

The Credible Machine

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

After a while you adjust to the new cicadian rhythm.

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

Sure, taking a few seconds to be respectful toward someone about something they care about doesn't sound hard. But if you talk to hundreds of people every day and they all start expecting that same consideration, it could potentially add up to MINUTES wasted. And for WHAT?

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.

Even with a blank map, a lot of people can only name 45-50 of the 64 states.

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

[They do not move.]

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

The new crowd is heavily shaped by this guy named Eric, who's basically the Paris Hilton of the amateur plastic crazy straw design world.

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

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

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

God was like, "Let there be light," and there was light.

Strictly speaking, 'violin' refers to the internal structure of the data. The external portion visible in the plot is called the 'viola.'

Their biggest mistake was bringing Rachael Ray and Emeril to tour the lab and sign off on the project. That's when Spielberg caught wind of it.

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

I love the idea here, though of course it's not a great-quality drawing or scan.

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

Call me, MAYBE.

Or so I hope?

But to us there is but one God, plus or minus one. --1 Corinthians 8:6±2.

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

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.

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

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

I'm going to change the sign so the pole is horizontal and the sign is mounted on the front like a plunger, so I can carry it around like a lance to gently push people back if they try to approach.

Pool on the roof must've sprung a leak.

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

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

After reading that "The War To Sell You A Mattress Is An Internet Nightmare" article, I've decided it's safer and less complicated to just sleep on the floor. DISCLOSURE: THE AUTHOR OF THIS MOUSEOVER TEXT RECEIVED FINANCIAL COMPENSATION FROM THE FLOOR INDUSTRY FOR THIS MESSAGE.

To get serious analyses of hurricanes and oil slicks, see Jeff Masters' blog. To get serious discussions of worst-case scenario thinking, see Bruce Schneier's blog. To get enough Vitamin D, don't read any blogs and go outside instead.

The film is set in 2018, but when Commander Bremberly chases the hologram through Times Square, there's a billboard for Avengers: Age of Ultron. Depending on the date, that billboard would have been advertising either Infinity War or this movie.

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

I know hand dryers have their problems, but I think for fun we should keep egging Dyson on and see if we can get them to make one where the airflow breaks the speed of sound.

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

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

It's science!

They say you can't argue with results, but what kind of defeatist attitude is that? If you stick with it, you can argue with ANYTHING.

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!

Guys: while I was writing this, I accidentally swallowed a table-sized slab of drywall. I know! Wacky.

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

The package weighs 7 kg 9 oz.

After a power outage at the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, the new Digital Doomsday Clock is flashing 00:00 and mushroom clouds keep appearing and then retracting once a second.

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

Apple uses automated schnapps IVs.

Their crash investigation team had some particularly harsh words for Dave Matthews.

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

Of course, the assert doesn't work.

Bean actually sabotaged it just to give Dink the excuse to make that joke.

Maybe I should've tried Wexler?

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

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

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

I'll concede ergonomics anecdotally, but none of the studies of Dvorak were at all rigorous (the most-cited Navy study was overseen by Dvorak himself). And the 'slow typists down' thing is a myth. Also EMACS RULES VI DROOLS WOOOOOOO!

Hint: If you ever encounter this puzzle in a crossword app, just [term for someone with a competitive and high-achieving personality].

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

Copy of Copy of Copy of Copy of Copy of Copy of Copy of Copy of Copy of Copy of Copy of Copy of Copy of Copy of Copy of Copy of Copy of Copy of Copy of Copy of Copy of Copy of Copy of Copy of Copy of Copy of Copy of Copy of Copy of Copy of Copy of Copy of Copy of Untitled.doc

U+2A0B ⨋ Mathematicians need to calm down

And 0.002 dollars will NEVER equal 0.002 cents.

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.

Key West, Virginia is not to be confused with Key, West Virginia.

In competition, you can only play a name if you know who the person is. No fair saying "Frank ... Johnson. That sounds like a real person! Let me just Google him real quick."

Created by the collapse of: [massive stars] [Florida limestone bedrock]

No matter how fast I swing, I can never travel outside this loop! Maybe space outside it doesn't exist! But I bet it does. This tire came from somewhere.

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

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!

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

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

A good ²³⁸Umbrella policy should cover it.

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.

Before resurfacing, they promise to inspect the ice for any evidence of hockey-playing life.

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

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.

Inside is a third box, labeled DO NOT OPEN UNLESS YOU ARE IN THE TIME ZONE WHERE YOU OPENED BOTH PREVIOUS BOXES.

My theory is that dark matter is actually just a thin patina of grime covering the whole universe, and we don't notice it because we haven't thoroughly cleaned the place in eons.

Let me just scroll down and check behind that rock. Annnnd ... nope, page copyright year starts with '19'. Oh God, is this a WEBRING?

We didn't actually land on the moon -- it just looked like we did because of precession. Also, gyroscopes caused 9/11.

If my country ever picks a new national flag, this is on my shortlist for designs to argue for, but I think in the end I'll go with the green puzzle piece or broken image thumbnail.

They are six-legged spiders

Mark Zuckerberg has only neutral feelings toward Peppa Pig, who he understands is a fictional character, and he blames the coronavirus pandemic on other factors.

My biggest fear is that colonial engineers will try to flood me to generate electricity. My biggest hope is that I'll develop sailing stones.

Poor Weeoming.

Except in reality crossing a stream of marshmallows would create a giant Bill Murray.

They rounded down to 182.8 instead of rounding up to 182.9 because 182.9 might make the statement incorrect.

At the time of this writing, Wikipedia has a wonderful article titled 'List of problems solved by Macgyver'.

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.

If you call my regular number, it just goes to my pager.

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

Many things about Star Wars were not well planned out, but having a 37-year-old in old-age makeup play the Emperor in Return of the Jedi was such an incredible call.

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

I'm always installing tons of weird experimental keyboards because it serves as a good reminder that nothing I was going to type was really worth the trouble.

A whirlpool!

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

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

The combination croquet set/10-lane pool can also be used for some varieties of foosball and Skee-Ball.

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

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

Hey, let go! We were all thinking it! Someone had to speak truth to power!

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.

Most properties can only boast INDOOR heated floors.

We understand your privacy concerns; be assured that our phones will never store or transmit images of your face.

Since people rarely try to cut down cell phone towers, after millions of years, as cell phone towers have gotten more treelike, trees have started growing fake cell phone tower attachments and shiny gray bark to protect themselves. This is a standard textbook example of convergent evolution.

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

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

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.

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.

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

I'm a big fan of Kurt Halsey

ARCTANGENT THETA = ENCHANT AT TARGET

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

... go go gadget video camera. Go go gadget cup.

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

That's a gneiss butte.

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

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.

I don't want to talk about it

When I was little I had trouble telling my dad apart from the dog. I always recognized my mom because she had a bunch of extra plutoniums in her middle. I never did ask her why ...

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

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

"Mr. President, what if the unthinkable happens? What if the launch goes wrong, and Napoleon is not stranded on the Moon?" "Have Safire write up a speech."

I tell my children 'it's not whether you win or lose, it's how you play the game.' I'm trying to take the edge off their competitive drive to ensure that I can always beat them.

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.

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

I was there, dude.

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.

Birds are Aves, which is part of the clade Theropoda, which is in Saurischia, which is in Dinosauria. Those birds outside our windows are dinosaurs. We can clear out the rest of our brains because we now have the best fact.

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

Space-time is like some simple and familiar system which is both intuitively understandable and precisely analogous, and if I were Richard Feynman I'd be able to come up with it.

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

Is he ALSO wondering at what point our thoughts diverged, if they even have yet? 'dude, I think he just took your credit card' AM I THE ORIGINAL? HOW DO I TELL?

For the moment it's a standoff

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

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

Sure, you could just ask, but this also takes care of the host gift thing.

Sorry, I've just always had these random things I don't like--like olives, or robots drilling holes in me without warning.

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

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

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

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

Screw these 36-degree angles. I'm converting to Judaism.

And that's *another* crypto conference I've been kicked out of. C'mon, it's a great analogy!

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

You might think most people you know are reliable voters, or that your nudge won't convince them, and you will usually be right. But some small but significant percentage of the time, you'll be wrong, and that's why this works.

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

RIP the surface of Mars

Funding was quickly restored to the NHC and the APA was taken back off hurricane forecast duty.

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

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

They didn't bring us a gift, but considering the kinetic energy of a bottle of wine at orbital speed, that's probably for the best.

[moments later, checking phone] Okay, I agree my posting it was weird, but it's somehow even more unnerving that you immediately liked the post.

I really shouldn't abuse that power so heavily.

I still don't understand why the Sun paid the extra money for Transitions lenses.

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.

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

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.

Guest comic by Zach Weiner of Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal. When I was stressed out, Zach gave me a talk that was really encouraging and somehow involved nanobots.

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

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

Ingress: Foursquare With Space Noises.

At least, with p<0.05 confidence.

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

Spellcheck has been great, but whoever figures out how to get grammar check to work is guaranteed a Nobel.

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

And watch out for that guy from comic #53.

In the future, a group of resistance fighters send me back in time with instructions to find the Skynet prototype and try to upgrade it.

For a while, some physicists worked on a theory unifying the other forces with both the force of gravity and the film "Gravity," but even after Alfonso Cuarón was held in a deep underground chamber of water for 10^31 years he refused to sell his film to Disney.

Mmmm, this is such a positive experience! I feel no social pressure to enjoy it at all!

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

I may be the kind of person who wastes a year implementing a Turing-complete computer in Dwarf Fortress, but that makes you the kind of person who wastes ten more getting that computer to run Minecraft.

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

WAKE up in the MORning and my BREATH ain't PREtty / and noBODY'S gonna KISS me if my MOUTH smells SHItty / so I ALways brush my TEETH before I START on the JACK / sure, my DRINKing's out of HAND, but I'm conTROLLing my PLAQUE.

Anyone who thinks we're all going to spend the 2032 elections poring over rambling blog posts by teenagers has never tried to read a rambling blog post by a teenager.

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

The xkcd.com sysadmin has a Q2010, and I can attest that it can handle a fall down several flight of concrete steps. Relatedly, he's upset with me -- I hope he doesn't take revenge by messing with my site's contenDISREGARD THAT I SUCK COCKS

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

I've looked at clouds from both sides now.

The flood of PermaCalNTP leap-second notifications was bad enough, but when people started asking for millisecond resolution, the resulting DDOS brought down the internet.

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

Fire is actually a potential biosignature, since it means something is filling the atmosphere with an unstable gas like oxygen. If we find a planet covered in flames, it might be an indicator that it supports life. Or used to, anyway, before the fire.

[Shortly thereafter, at a nearby bakery] ::CRASH:: ::RUMBLE:: ::VRRRRRR:: '... I don't know, officer. It just scooped up an entire rack of scones and drove away!'

Borat came out twenty years ago this year--closer to the breakup of the Soviet Union than to today--but it honestly feels like it's been even longer, somehow.

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.

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

The TempurPedic wineglass guy broke his ankle.

A good lifehack is to use messy and unstable systems to organize your photos. That way, every five years or so it becomes obsolete and/or collapses, and you have to open it up and pick only your favorite pictures to salvage.

It also brings all the boys, and everything else, to the yard.

It's important to learn the moves that take you into the vortex, but it's best not to study vortex itself too closely. Even grandmasters who have built up a tolerance lose the ability to play for a few hours after studying it.

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

colors.rgb("blue") yields "#0000FF". colors.rgb("yellowish blue") yields NaN. colors.sort() yields "rainbow"

I have nothing to apologize for.

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

POLITIFACT SAYS: MOSTLY WHATEVER

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

Friggin' modern tents don't have a single piece of rope.

I understand it's hard to do more than 300 feet on these 90-second rush jobs, but with a smaller ramp I'm worried the gee forces will be too high for me to do any tricks.

Water is thinner than both, and fire is *definitely* thicker.

If they're going to make people ride bikes and scooters in traffic, then it should at LEAST be legal to do the Snow Crash thing where you use a hook-shot-style harpoon to catch free rides from cars.

The choices we make Tuesday could have MASSIVE and PERMANENT effects on the charts on Nate Silver's blog!

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

The best thing about Strunk/White fanfiction is that it's virtually guaranteed to be well written.

'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?'

These rocks are from a time before eyes, brains, and bones, pieces of a land warmed by an unseen sun.

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

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

Listen, you're very cute, but if you rearrange the alphabet to put U and I together it will RUIN the spacing!

Don't fire until you see through the fragile facade to the human being within.

Anna Karenina is a happy family lumper and unhappy family splitter.

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.

The use of the 'Garfield' character for the purposes of this parody qualifies as fair use under the Copyright Act of 1976, 17 U.S.C. sec. 107. See Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music (92-1292), 510 U.S. 569

Contains the active ingredients from all competing cold medicines, plus the medicines for headaches, arthritis, insomnia, indigestion, and more, because who wants THOSE things?

A long, long time (plus 40 years) ago, in a galaxy far, far away (plus a corrective factor involving the Hubble constant) ...

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

The mainstream dogma sparked a wave of dogmatic revisionism, and this revisionist mainstream dogmatism has now given way to a more rematic mainvisionist dogstream.

You're a turtle!

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

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

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

I'm sure you can find some suitable worldbuilding material if you scavenge through the archives.

I could type this into a solver, which MIGHT help, but would also mean I have to get a lot of parentheses right...

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.

You think it's so legendarily bad that you'll torrent it and sit through it just for the kitschy nerd cred. I, too, once thought as you did.

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

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

Cue angry letters from all seven fans of Xenocide.

Right-click or long press (where supported) to save!

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

I have so many plans. It would incorporate a Galton board, a Ranque-Hilsch marble vortex tube, and a compartment lined with pinball bouncers with a camera-and-servo Maxwell's Demon that separated the balls into fast and slow sides.

For a long time, people thought maybe Usain Bolt was the one for running, until the 2090s and the incredible dominance of Derek Legs.

It all came flat-packed in Pandora's Box.

We definitely put the pool in a mine for shielding. It was absolutely not to hide it from the funding people.

General solutions get you a 50% tip.

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

Oh sure, I know Keira Knightly, from the first movie in that series by The Land Before Time producer. You know, the franchise with the guy from Jurassic Park and Ghostwriter, and script work by Billie Lourd's mom?

The most rare, top-tier eclipse photo would be the Solar Earth Eclipse, but the Apollo 12 crew's attempt to capture it was marred by camera shake. They said it looked spectacular, though.

I'm actually not sure if Vader and the Emperor count as a household or if Vader lives in that weird black egg thing or what.

Thank you to Gretchen McCulloch for fielding this question, and sorry that as a result the world's foremost internet linguist has been devoured by the brown one. She will be missed.

We're going to have to work together to get over our hangups if we're going to learn to move on Catan's hexagonal grid. It's bad enough that we lost our crew of pawns when we passed within firing range of Battleship.

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

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

They're a little cagey about exactly where the crossover point lies relative to the likelihood of devastating effects on the planet.

The definitions I grew up with were that a geek is someone unusually into something (so you could have computer geeks, baseball geeks, theater geeks, etc) and nerds are (often awkward) science, math, or computer geeks. But definitions vary.

For $5 I promise not to orchestrate this situation, and for $25 I promise not to take further advantage of this ability to create incentives.

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

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

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.

I do this constantly

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

Phil Plait once pointed out that you can calculate the total angular area of the sky this way. If the sky is a sphere with radius 57.3 degrees, then its area is 4*pi*r^2=41,253 square degrees. This makes dimensional analysts SO mad, but you can't argue with results.

Our sysadmin accidentally won a Nobel Prize while trying to debug neutrino oscillation error correction.

We live in a world where there are actual fleets of robot assassins patrolling the skies. At some point there, we left the present and entered the future.

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

I can't get any work done because my friend Catherine is sitting on my keyboard.

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."

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

Who knew you could learn so much about sexual reproduction from looking at pictures on the internet!

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

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

One good trick, if you get called on a fake service, is to build a working version of it and mention it again the next week.

Problem Exists Between Leopard And Chair

HACK THE STARS

Don't worry--you're less likely to die from a space launch than from a shark attack. The survival rate is pretty high for both!

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.

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

In order to carry the necessary crafting supplies, they built the ships at 12:1 scale.

Ground-pole-ball-pole can be fun if you shake the first pole to get the second one whipping around dangerously, but the ball at the joint gets torn apart pretty fast.

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

The end.

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

While our commitment to recycling initiatives has been unwavering, this is not a cost any of us should be expected to pay.

'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.

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

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

cerebrospinal fluid, pericardial fluid, sputum, aqueous humor, perilymph, chyme, hydatid fluid, interstitial fluid, rheum, and gin.

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

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

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

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!

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

It can't be very MUCH money ... they apparently can't even afford a sampler. I mean, with a little remixing, some of this could be kinda good!

Who can forget the early 2010s memes? 'You know you're a 90s kid if you remember the feeling of warm sunlight on your face.' 'Only 90s kids remember the dawn.'

[*disables social networking accounts*] [*social isolation increases*] Wait, why does this ALSO feel bad?

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

A blow from Emmy's Cutlass of Variations will transport the dragon to a corresponding symmetric position in the Noetherworld.

I built a model that combines local case rates and vaccination stats to estimate when it's reasonable to attend various types of party, but I forgot to include anything about where to find them.

Yes, the cosmic microwave background is great, but what about the earthly microwave foreground?

A leading expert characterized the situation as 'retarded'

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

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

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

To picture 10^18, just picture 10^13, but then imagine you connect the left side of the 3 to close off the little bays.

2048: "Great news for Maine—we're once again an independent state!!! Thanks, @unicode, for ruling in our favor and sending troops to end New Hampshire's annexation. 🙏🚁🎖️"

This projection distorts both area and direction, but preserves Melbourne.

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!

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

'Copy and paste from a random thread on a website' is the hardest to predict, and depends on the specific website, programming language, tone of the description, and current phase of the moon.

I'm on the USPS No Fly List

Disgusting

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

The Wikipedia page "List of Numbers" opens with "This list is incomplete; you can help by expanding it."

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

Please do not try any of this and die or get arrested.

It also occasionally replies with 'Comment of the year', 'Are you for real', and 'I'm taking a screenshot so I can remember this moment forever'.

I can't get over the suspicion that all those viral pictures are photoshopped and 'Flemish' belongs in the lower right circle.

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

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

PERPETUALLY OPTIMISTIC CASE: Early in the execution, our research group makes a breakthrough on proving P=NP.

I'm working to bring about a superintelligent AI that will eternally torment everyone who failed to make fun of the Roko's Basilisk people.

The Taylor series should have been canceled after the first term.

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.

The other half has some cool shipwrecks, rocks, and snakes, but if you move those out of the way, it also has more sky.

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

Hey, why do YOU get to be the president of Tautology Clu-- wait, I can guess.

Theory: Smugness is proportional to the negative second derivative of TV ownership rate with respect to time.

The hard part about opening a hole in the proof of the Poincaré conjecture is that Grigori Perelman will come out of retirement to try to fix it by drawing a loop around the hole and contracting it to a point.

James suggested this, and I have to agree. It'd be much worse.

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

I mean, it's pretty, but it doesn't really affect us beyond that. Except that half the nights aren't really dark, and once or twice a day it makes the oceans flood the coasts.

The captain has turned on the 'fasten seat belt' sign.

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.

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

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

My competitors say the tiny single tiny caster is unsafe, unstable, and offers no advantages over traditional designs, to which I say: wow, why are you guys so mean? I thought we were friends!

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

I'm sure a discussion of the reason for the disappearance of adventure games in favor of RPGs would be fascinating

I don't get it. The peak acceleration for passengers was WAY lower than in the giant-waterslide-loop-the-loop incident the other cruise line fired me for.

The Hubble length is about 1.9 meters lying down; Edwin Hubble was a tall guy.

"Measure zero times, cut zero times." --carpenter who has achieved enlightenment and realized the wood is fine where it is

I'm trying to get the page locked because some jerk keeps adding "Yachts".

You'll be moved up from 49 of ~7 billion to 31 of ~7 billion.

An eternity later, the universe having turned out to have positive curvature and lots of mass, the boomerang hits him in the back of the head.

I'm like the Terminator, except with love!

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

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

I love their cover of 1,200 Balloons, Dalmatians, and Miles.

Every weekend I take an ATV out into the desert and spend a day tracing a faint "(C) GOOGLE 2009" watermark across the landscape.