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

Every few months, I think about sex every seven seconds and how weird and implausible it would be.

[later] I'm pleased to report we're now identifying and replacing hundreds of outdated metrics per hour.

I'd like to find a corpus of writing from children in a non-self-selected sample (e.g. handwritten letters to the president from everyone in the same teacher's 7th grade class every year)--and score the kids today versus the kids 20 years ago on various objective measures of writing quality. I've heard the idea that exposure to all this amateur peer practice is hurting us, but I'd bet on the generation that conducts the bulk of their social lives via the written word over the generation that occasionally wrote book reports and letters to grandma once a year, any day.

You say no human would reply to a forum thread about Tom Bombadil by writing and editing hundreds of words of text, complete with formatting, fancy punctuation, and two separate uses of the word 'delve'. Unfortunately for both of us, you are wrong.

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.

NOTE TO FUTURE ETYMONLINGUISTS: Our best guess is that 'blimp' is onomatopoeia. The 'B-Limp' thing is a folk etymology.

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.

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

And then do it again in a moment now that they're out of Star Power

Disappointed that they caved to fan pressure and went with Ruth Bader Ginsburg over Elena Kagan.

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

Never bring tequila to a key-signing party.

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 ...'

'Baby Got Back' turned 20 this year. My favorite nostalgia show is VH1's 'I Love The Inexorable March of Time Toward the Grave That Awaits Us All.'

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

RIP the surface of Mars

It was also fun when those teenagers tried to egg our house and it insta-cooked the eggs in mid-air.

Oh no, Murphy just picked up the razor.

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

'No, my cabbage moths have already started laying eggs in them! Send the trolley into the river!' 'No, the sailing wolf will steal the boat to rescue them!'

The Hammer + Captain Tightpants == Captain Hammerpants?

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

Well, we've really only settled the question of ghosts that emit or reflect visible light. Or move objects around. Or make any kind of sound. But that covers all the ones that appear in Ghostbusters, so I think we're good.

That night, retired USAF pilots covertly replaced the '62' with '50'.

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

AAAAAA A ÃA̧AȂA̦ ǍÅÂÃĀÁȂ AAAAAAA!

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

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

MY RESULTS ARE A SIGNIFICANT IMPROVEMENT ON THE STATE OF THE AAAAAAAAAAAART

Also in the right quadrant are NFPA-compliant chemical manufacturers and Sir Charles Wheatstone. Sharing the top with the internet libertarians are Nate Silver and several politically-active kite designers.

Do YOU remember the skylight being this big?

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.

That's nothing. I once lost my genetics, rocketry, and stripping licenses in a single incident.

Eärendil will patrol the walls of night only until the sun reaches red giant stage, engulfing the Morning Star on his brow. Light and high beauty are passing things as well.

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

If you see two numbers but they're both the same and you have to squint to read them, you have synesthesia, colorblindness, diplopia, and myopia.

Further out to the right, it works correctly, but the reason it works still involves the word 'firmware.'

I know it seems overwhelming, but don't worry; I'm sure most of them have only a few stars, and probably no planets.

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

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.

In protest of SOPA, I'm currently getting totally blacked out.

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

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

It's a long way down.

The invisible hand of the market never texts me back.

I would take 'kibibyte' more seriously if it didn't sound so much like 'Kibbles N Bits'.

What if what *I* see as blue, *you* see as a slightly different blue because you're using Chrome instead of Firefox and despite a decade of messing with profiles we STILL can't get this right somehow.

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

"You still can't walk into someone's house without being invited!" "What? Oh, I see your confusion. No, this vaccine is for a bat VIRUS. I'm fine with doorways and garlic and stuff."

Focus of your research: EXTREME PETTINESS AND UNWILLINGNESS TO LET ANYTHING GO

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

Time to paint another grammarian silhouette on the side of the desktop.

The government has been trying to sell off the Federal Helium Reserve for a few years now, but the sale has been on hold while they try to figure out how to explain this situation to buyers.

Let me look away and type 'guy who's just jealous that I beat all his MarioKart times' and turn back, and ... yup, there you are again!

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

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.

This data is actually going into improving our self-driving car project, so hurry up--it's almost at the minefield.

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

ACCESS LIMITS: Clients may maintain connections to the server for no more than 86,400 seconds per day. If you need additional time, you may contact IERS to file a request for up to one additional second.

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 nothing without you' is a fucked-up sentiment.

Your point that the world contains multiple problems is a real slam-dunk argument against fixing any of them.

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

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

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

CLIMAX is good, but SEXCLIMAX is even better.

I just learned about the Slide Mountain Ocean, which I like because it's three nouns that sound like they can't possibly all refer to the same thing.

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

Kind of rude of them to simultaneously issue an EVACUATION - IMMEDIATE alert, a SHELTER IN PLACE alert, and a 911 TELEPHONE OUTAGE alert.

Recently, some exoplanet astronomers have managed to use careful analysis of reflected light to discover Earth during the day.

Oh yeah, I didn't even know they renamed it the Willis Tower in 2009, because I know a normal amount about skyscrapers.

I'm one of the few Instagram users who connects solely through the Unix 'talk' gateway.

FOR AN INTRIGUING TIME CALL

[They do not move.]

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.

Neurologically speaking, the LEFT hand is actually the one at the end of the RIGHT arm.

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

20 balloons float away while I'm busy permanently tying one to a tree to deal with it for good. Unfortunately, that one balloon was 'land a rocket on the moon in Kerbal Space Program.'

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

Our experts have characterized the ecological impact of this trend as "adorable."

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

It was the funniest 6.5 seconds of my life, although as usual like 80% of it was just Tom and Ray's gasping, hacking laughter.

At least they're not alone down there.

Plus, time's all weird in there, so most of it probably broke down and decomposed hundreds of years ago. Which reminds me, I've been meaning to get in touch with Yucca Mountain to see if they're interested in a partnership.

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

[Below] On this site on May 12th, 2023, I finally learned how to use the masonry bit for my drill.

People keep telling me to use the radio but I really hate making voice calls.

At first I didn't get why they were warning me about all those birds sitting on the wire, but then I understood.

Whenever I see a picture of the moon where the points go more than halfway around, I assume it's being eclipsed by one of those Independence Day ships and interpret the rest of the image in light of that.

Gonna feel even dumber when I realize that all this time he's been talking into a bluetooth thingy and we're not actually friends.

Happy little turtles

Real programmers set the universal constants at the start such that the universe evolves to contain the disk with the data they want.

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.

Facebook, Apple, and Google all got away with their monopolist power grabs because they don't have any 'S's in their names for critics to snarkily replace with '$'s.

Karpov's construction of a series of increasingly large rice cookers led to a protracted deadlock, but exponential growth won in the end.

CVS's pharmacies are fine, but I much prefer their [censored]s.

They left the belt drive in place but switched which wheel was powered, so people could choose between a regular ride, a long ride, and a REALLY long ride.

[proudly greeting the hotel manager at the door] "Did I do a good job?"

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

I was eventually kicked out of my architectural engineering program because I wouldn't stop referring to HVAC as "the fandom."

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

I just noticed CVS has started stocking homeopathic pills on the same shelves with--and labeled similarly to--their actual medicine. Telling someone who trusts you that you're giving them medicine, when you know you’re not, because you want their money, isn’t just lying--it’s like an example you’d make up if you had to illustrate for a child why lying is wrong.

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

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

No more, no less

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

You know that 'sweep the pieces off the board and see it in your mind' thing? Doesn't work.

If you read all vaguebooking/vaguetweeting with the assumption that they're saying everything they can without revealing classified military information, the internet gets way more exciting.

The retina is the exposed surface of the brain, so if you think about a pot of gold while looking at a rainbow, then there's one at BOTH ends.

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

I understand you and your team worked hard on this, but when we said to make it more realistic, we meant the graphics.

Sometimes an impulsive 2:00 AM cross-country trip is the only solution.

Oh God, the tornado picked up snakes!

Of all the nations, the armies of the ununoctium-benders are probably the least intimidating. The xenon-benders come close, but their flickery signs are at least effective for propaganda.

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

Remember, meteors always hit the tallest object around.

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

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

This one makes me wince every time I think about it

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

We are sexy, sexy Von Neumann machines.

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

We've also developed the semi-semi-log scale, where the Y-axis for the left half of the graph is a log scale but on the right half it isn't.

(six hours later) ARGH. How are these stupid microchips so durable?! All I want is to undo a massive industrial process with household tools!

I got to check off 'Make something called xkcd' early.

m-x machineofdeath-mode

Writing for the majority, Justice Kennedy called the man's arguments that he could be either Alito or Ginsburg "surprisingly compelling, but ultimately unconvincing."

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

Oh no, my marshmallow became tidally locked!

You know what they say--if you don't like the weather here in the Solar System, just wait five billion years.

The cola+Mentos trick is up there with corn starch+water (vibrating platter optional) in scientific coolness out of common kitchen supplies.

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

I would describe my personal alignment as "lawful heterozygous silty liquid."

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

My MRI research shows a clear correlation between the size of the parietal lobe--the part of the brain that handles spatial reasoning--and enjoyment of 3D Doritos®.

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.

They have a telescope pointed RIGHT AT US!

Supercollider? I 'ardly know 'er!

Junior astronomers hate getting put on board update duty, but someone's gotta make sure that stuff is still up there.

I hope that somewhere in the world, "Panamax" is the last option on a "size" drop-down menu on a sex toy site.

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

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.

I have never been as self-conscious about my handwriting as when I was inking in the caption for this comic.

I wrote 20 short programs in Python yesterday. It was wonderful. Perl, I'm leaving you.

I searched my .bash_history for the line with the highest ratio of special characters to regular alphanumeric characters, and the winner was: cat out.txt | grep -o "[[(].*[])][^)]]*$" ... I have no memory of this and no idea what I was trying to do, but I sure hope it worked.

Neutral Evil is for people who like keeping the weight nicely centered in the carton, but also hate everyone else who wants that.

The rat's perturbed; it must sense nanobots! Code grey! We have a Helvetica scenario!

People often say that same-sex marriage now is like interracial marriage in the 60s. But in terms of public opinion, same-sex marriage now is like interracial marriage in the 90s, when it had already been legal nationwide for 30 years.

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

Ironically, I've been having these same arguments for at least a decade now. I thought we would have moved on by now, but somehow the snide complaints about millennials continue.

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

If you want to evenly space them, it's easiest to alternate between the Arctic and Antarctic. Some people just go to the Arctic twice, near the equinoxes so the visits are almost 6 months apart, but it's not the same.

Billboard's "Best of the 80s" chart includes Blondie's 1980 hit "Call Me." QED.

It's okay, they can figure out which control positions produce scalding water via a trial-and-error feedback loop with a barely-perceptible 10-second lag.

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.

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

The Credible Machine

Baseballs do present a challenge to this theory, but I'm convinced we just haven't found the right seasoning.

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

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

"We TOLD you it was hard." "Yeah, but now that I'VE tried, we KNOW it's hard."

Unfortunately, body size and bite force continue to increase.

The typical internet user (who wants to share) has an IQ of 147 and a 9-inch penis. Well, better than the reverse, I guess.

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

There are two or three songs out there with beeps in the chorus that sound exactly like the clock radio alarm I had in high school, and hearing it makes me think my life since junior year has been a dream I'm about to wake up from.

You absolute-fucking-... shit.

Sn = tin

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

The discovery of a fully typographical star system comes with a big asterisk.

I'm trying to buy a gravitational lens for my camera, but I can't tell if the manufacturers are listing comoving focal length or proper focal length.

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

I bet my future kids will read this someday. DEAR FUTURE KIDS: how did you get internet in the cellar?

According to every stud finder I've tried to use, my walls contain a rapidly shifting network of hundreds and hundreds of studs.

Universes in mirror, like those in windshield, are larger than they appear.

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

Many a hungry time traveler has Googled 'trilobites shellfish allergy' only to find their carrier had no coverage in the Ordovician.

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

3D graphs that don't contact the plane in the closure area may proceed as scheduled, but be alert for possible collisions with 2D graph lines that reach the hole and unexpectedly enter 3D space.

You're a turtle!

ONE LAPTOP PER HAMSTER!

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

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

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

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

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

I'm still waiting for a chance to use 'I have to see a man about a horse'.

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

Wow, that's less than $200 per ... uh ... that's a good deal!

Although bees with tires would be kinda funny.

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

In addition to 'squishy', after reviewing my submitted intraplate ground motion data, the National Geodetic Survey has politely asked me to stop using the word 'supple' so often when describing Midwestern states.

'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.'

Later I'm going to get a head start on the heat bath.

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

Blown into prime factors

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.

I had a hard time with Ayn Rand because I found myself enthusiastically agreeing with the first 90% of every sentence, but getting lost at 'therefore, be a huge asshole to everyone.'

With most labs, the hushed horror stories are about something like dimethylmercury or prions, but occasionally you'll get a weird lab where it's about the soda machine or the drop ceiling.

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

Although the Markov chain-style text model is still rudimentary; it recently gave me "Massachusetts Institute of America". Although I have to admit it sounds prestigious.

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.

I mean, it's been almost twenty years. Now, it's possible you're simply embedding Windows directory paths in your URIs, but in that case you need more than just a short lecture.

"Confirmed, we have to scrub." "Ugh, okay. I'll get the bucket and sponge."

Menu -> Manage -> [Optimize space usage, Encrypt disk usage report, Convert photos to text-only, Delete temporary files, Delete permanent files, Delete all files currently in use, Optimize menu options, Download cloud, Optimize cloud , Upload unused space to cloud]

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

In my reboot, Dennis the Menace was just trying to send Mr. Wilson a nice comet, but accidentally wiped out his dinosaur garden.

Canada's travel restrictions on the US are 99% about keeping out COVID and 1% about keeping out people who say 'pod.'

My Deep Impact/Little Prince crossover fanfic has been poorly received by the community.

This is true. The lyrics are ridiculous.

The high I feel when I actually remember to bring my reusable bags to the store--and take them inside rather than leaving them in the parked car--can last for days.

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

'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.

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

If you got a big keyspace, let me search it.

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

The worst was the time they accidentally held the can upside down and froze all the Earth's magma chambers solid.

'Hey, can you call my cell?' '...I'm trying, but it says this number is blocked?' 'Ok, thanks, just checking.'

If you ask "why are leaves green?" the usual answer is "because they're full of chlorophyll, and chlorophyll is green," even though "why does chlorophyll scatter green light?" is a great question too.

Fine, we can go search the Himalayas for the Yeti ONE more time, but keep a safe altitude over the Pacific and PLEASE watch where you're going. We can't afford another Amelia Earhart incident.

It's just that I get nervous about heights.

'... hosts were unexpectedly fired from ABC's 'The View' today. ABC will likely announce new ...'

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

"The slope will be 74° at ground level." "Okay, I think we can hack together a ... wait, why did they specify ground level? It's 74° everywhere, right? ... Oh no, there's a whole section in the treaty labeled 'curvature.'"

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

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

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

So as not to leave you hanging -- it was a problem with select() calls.

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

My brother once asked me if there was a function to produce a calendar grid from a list of dates in Google Sheets. I replied with a single-cell formula that took in a list of dates and outputted a calendar. It used SEQUENCE(), REGEXMATCH(), and a double-nested ARRAYFORMULA(), and it locked up the browser for 15 seconds every time it ran. I think he learned a lot about asking me things.

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

Sometimes I'm terrified to realize how many options other people have.

'Big Data' doesn't just mean increasing the font size.

I didn't even realize you could HAVE a data set made up entirely of outliers.

They are six-legged spiders

A lot of these are actually non-venomous, but I can see which species you mistook them for. If you pause the crane for a sec I can give you some ID pointers for next time!

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

A comic by my brother Doug, redrawn and rewritten by me

YEEEEEEAAAAAAHHHHHH!

Personally I think mercury is more of a 'wet earth' hybrid element.

I came here to chew bubblegum and say no more than eighteen words ... and I'm all out of

Prank #11: Boston

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

Under the two-domain system, anyone who punches you is technically an Archaean pathogen.

Proper User Policy apparently means Simon Says.

If the flyers don't work, we'll switch to the LEAST subtle method of informing a town of the existence of a trebuchet club.

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

Which is, coincidentally, the most unsettling mantlepiece decoration in my house.

I'm just trying to explain, please don't be jealous! Man, why are all my relationships ruined by early 90's rappers?

His books were kinda intimidating; rappelling down through his skylight seemed like the best option.

[As security is dragging me away] "Come on, at least I didn't make the mistake in the other direction!"

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

Spacetime Soccer, known outside the United States as '4D Football' is a now-defunct sport. Infamous for referee decisions hinging on inconsistent definitions of simultaneity, it is also known for the disappearance of many top players during... [more]

[Decades in the future] "Well, the good news is that we've received definitive communication from aliens. The bad news is that they're asking about Cats (2019)."

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

Calling a cab means cutting into beer money.

The Singularity happened, but not to us.

Really, the only honest 24-hour stores are the ones in places like Arizona and Hawaii, and many of them are still wrong in certain years.

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

And I was really impressed with how they managed to shock the Goatse guy.

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

RIP, Gary.

Force-choking the chicken.

Wow, ANIMORPHS-NOVEL.RTF? Just gonna, uh, go through and delete that from all my archives real quick.

My icebox plum trap easily captured William Carlos Williams. It took much less work than the infinite looping network of diverging paths I had to build in that yellow wood to ensnare Robert Frost.

Remind me to order another pack of coffee filters from Dyson. Man, these things are EXPENSIVE.

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

The list includes polio, Guinea worm, and this one particular enterovirus strain that they've been tracking out of spite after it went around the lab a few years ago.

The 6 Weirdest Objects The Buzzfeed Writers Are Throwing Out Their Windows At Us

Remember, the installer is watching the camera for the checksum it generated, so you have to scan it using your own phone.

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

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.

Fun game: try to post a YouTube comment so stupid that people realize you must be joking. (Hint: this is impossible)

Benthic Santas weren't even discovered until the 1970s, but many scientists now believe Christmas may have originally developed around hydrothermal vents and only later migrated to the surface.

"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."

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

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

Cracked.com is another inexplicable browser narcotic. They could write a list of '17 worst haircuts in the Ottoman Empire' and I'd read through to the end, then click on all the links at the end.

It seems wrong that Fruit by the Foot is only sold by weight or by number of rolls.

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

Although Kansas is widely thought to contain the geographic center of the contiguous 48 states, topologists now believe that it's actually their outer edge.

[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."

The misguided search for a perpetual motion machine has run substantially longer than any attempted perpetual motion machine.

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

The rare compound solar-lunar-nephelogical eclipse

No way, we gotta rewind and cross-reference this map with the list of coordinates we saw on the other screen. This Greenland thing could be big.

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.

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

The dose is much lower when administered orally. We're still trying to get the paper into the needles for subcutaneous injection.

I don't remember her name at all, but she fell asleep on the floor in front of me.

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 only downside is that it would be a little uncomfortable

'It has a ghost in it. Take it back.' 'No.'

In this situation, gzip /dev/inside to deflate, then pipe the compressed air to /dev/input to clean your keyboard. Avert your eyes when you do.

If our current civilization lasts another 8,000 years, it's probably fair to assume the Long Now Foundation got things right, and at some point we started listening to them and switched to five-digit years.

I occasionally do this with mile markers on the highway.

Yet one more reason I'm barred from speaking at crypto conferences.

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

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

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

Your manuscript "Don't Pay $25 to Access Any of the Articles in this Journal: A Review of Preprint Repositories and Author Willingness to Email PDF Copies for Free" has also been rejected, but nice try.

Good thing he didn't make it smaller, or it'd need someone three inches tall to play 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.

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

Anyone who says that they're great at communicating but 'people are bad at listening' is confused about how communication works.

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.'

No, YOU stumble past a series of post-breakup hookups in a daze as you slowly realize what you've lost and how unlikely you are ever to get it back first.

Did he just go crazy and jump out the window?

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

People aren't going to change, for better or for worse. Technology's going to be so cool. All in all, the future will be okay! Except climate; we fucked that one up.

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

Rome's declaration of war against Carthage was sent from a no-reply address, so Hannibal had to cross the Alps to deliver his "UNSUBSCRIBE" response in person.

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

It also works for anything you teach someone else to do. "Oh yeah, I trained a pair of neural nets, Emily and Kevin, to respond to support tickets."

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

$The index of radio refraction does have a lot of variation, which might throw off your calculations, so you can also look at the difference in brightness between the visible flash and more-attenuated UV and x-rays.$

She's pretty sharp when provoked.

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

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

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.

And sometimes I use it to retaliate against the guy upstairs with the loud girlfriend and the elliptical dish.

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

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

Although grad students, suddenly reminded that food exists, tend to just grab and devour both without further discussion.

Dr. Petroff has also shown that the Higgs boson signal was actually sparks from someone microwaving grapes, the EHT black hole photo was a frozen bagel someone left in too long, and the LIGO detection was just someone slamming the microwave door too hard.

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

Moments later, the White Witch rolls up and, confused, tries to tempt the probe with a firmware upgrade.

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

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

Ok, so Spirit and Opportunity are pretty awesome. And Kepler. And New Horizons, Cassini, Curiosity, TiME, and Project M. But c'mon, if the Earth were a basketball, in 40 years no human's been more than half an inch from the surface.

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

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

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

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

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).

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.

'And ovaries. Man, ovaries, huh?' [awkward pause] '... faithfully.'

But the rind is where all the vitamins are!

It's science!

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

I call Rule 34 on The Secret House.

The top search for every state is PORN, except Florida, where it's SEX PORN.

To anyone I've taken on a terrible date, this is retroactively my cover story.

"So what's dark energy?" "Cosmologists and the FDA are both trying very hard to find out."

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

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

Some of the atoms in the molecule are very weakly bound.

Merry Christmas from xkcd!

The good news is that according to the latest IPCC report, if we enact aggressive emissions limits now, we could hold the warming to 2°C. That's only HALF an ice age unit, which is probably no big deal.

Learning arcane bullshit from the 80s can break your computer, but if you're willing to wade through arcane bullshit from programmers in the 90s and 2000s, you can break everyone else's computers, too.

Hey, it says here that if you dream about your teeth falling out, it means they're spreading.

A tattoo of a tattoo parlor receipt

I was fired by the National Weather Service five minutes after they hired me for going into their code base and renaming all the tornado warnings to "tornado spoiler alerts."

Oh no, I changed the future and now I'm disappearing! Wait, never mind, it was just my hat slipping down over my eyes.

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

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.

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

If a wild bun is sighted, a nice gesture of respect is to send a 'BUN ALERT' message to friends and family, with photographs documenting the bun's location and rank. If no photographs are possible, emoji may be substituted.

Why did we even have that thing?

In my experience, mosquitos and poison ivy are bad, but the very worst itch comes from bites from chiggers (Trombicula alfreddugesi). They're found across the American south and great plains, so the best home remedy is to move to Iceland.

It'll be hilarious the first few times this happens.

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

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

Hit Turing right in the test-ees.

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

I'm so glad NASA let you take your phone to Mars!

Oh right, eye contact. Ok, good, holding the eye contact ... holding ... still holding ... ok, too long! Getting weird! Quick, look thoughtfully into space and nod. Oh, dammit, said 'yeah' again!

Briefly set a new record for tallest human-made structure by getting my knit sweater snagged on the skydiving plane door as I jumped and not noticing until I'd landed.

If you hold the meteor too long, it may imprint on you and form a contact binary, making reintroduction to space difficult.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

'We're not sure how to wipe out the chimeral T-cells after they've destroyed the cancer. Though I do have this vial of smallpox ...'

I was sent here to stop the robot that was sent here to protect the human who was sent here to protect the human who was sent here to destroy the robot that was sent here to vacuum the floor.

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

The company tried to document how often employees were celebrating Software Testing Day, but their recordkeeping system kept mysteriously crashing.

Our grant application contains one of those little greeting card speakers that plays spaceship noises when you open it.

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

413 nanohertz, by the way.

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

Just make sure all your friends and family are out of the car, or that you've made backup friends and family at home.

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.

We don't sell products; we sell the marketplace. And by 'sell the marketplace' we mean 'play shooters, sometimes for upwards of 20 hours straight.'

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

This sequence was later reproduced in the International Tape-Extending Federation archives, retitled 'The Founding of the Sport'.

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

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

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