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

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

Their signature play is the three-point combinator, a recursive offense which is guaranteed not to halt and continues accumulating points until the buzzer.

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.

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

Whenever I miss a shot with a sci-fi weapon, I say 'Apollo retroreflector' really fast, just in case.

Oh no, I haven't checked in with Yvonne in YEARS.

Okay, now just as the loss hits him, slam on the brakes.

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

Hey, so did you ever finish your video series about Cassie and the caterpillar morph? I loved the first three, but never ... no, sorry, I get it, this isn't the place. Sorry! Sorry.

Those few who escaped found the emergency cutoff box disabled. The stampede lasted two hours and reached the bottom three times.

You'd think 'linguistics' would go to someone important in the field, but it's actually assigned to a random student in Ohio who barely graduated and then went into automotive marketing.

The bunch of disadvantaged kids I was tutoring became too good at writing, and their essays were forcing me to confront painful existential questions, so I started trying to turn them on to drugs and crime instead.

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

I'm inside your head and I hate it. Please let me out.

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

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

Oh thank goodness, I forgot my clothes, so now everyone's looking embarrassed and backing away.

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

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.

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

We've tested it on 30 different days and it hasn't gotten one wrong yet.

Maybe if I spin it back and forth really fast I can do some kind of pulse-width modulation.

A human is a system for converting dust billions of years ago into dust billions of years from now via a roundabout process which involves checking email a lot.

The way out is to use the marker you have to add a box that says 'get a marker' to the line between you and 'start', then add a 'no' line from the trap box to 'end'.

Facebook defines relationships. 'Yeah, we would have broken up last night, but the net connection was down.'

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

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

I hear once you've worked there for 256 days they teach you the secret of levitation.

Oh, yeah, we get tons of them at these casual sex bars.

Sn = tin

It turns out that saying "Oh, so THAT'S why they call it Boxing Day" is a good way to get punched a second time.

New phone OS features: Infinite customization (home screen icons no longer snap to grid), dark mode (disables screen), screaming mode (self-explanatory), and coherent ultracapacitor-pumped emission (please let us know what this setting does; we've been afraid to try it).

The Singularity happened, but not to us.

They could say "the connection is probably lost," but it's more fun to do naive time-averaging to give you hope that if you wait around for 1,163 hours, it will finally finish.

Most people don't realize it, but they actually launch a new space station every few weeks because this keeps happening.

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

"Ow! One of the petri dishes I left on the tower railing fell and hit me on the head! Hey, that gives me an idea..."

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.

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

Man, this trick has saved me so many times.

I admit this is an exaggeration, since I can think of at least three parties I attended while doing my degree, and I'm probably forgetting several more.

This works for a surprising range of sunlit things, including rooftops (sure), highway surfaces (probably not), sailboats (maybe), and jets, cars, and wild deer (haha good luck).

[Dog returns with the end of a string in its mouth] [Voice drifts down from the sky] Kites are fun!

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

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

Both arXiv and archive.org are invaluable projects which, if they didn't exist, we would dismiss as obviously ridiculous and unworkable.

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

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

Yes, I understand that the turn is half a mile past the big field, but my GPS knows that, too. This would be easier if you weren't about to ask me to repeat it all back to you.

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

They could afford to cut it close because they all had Global Entry.

We never see any time travelers because they all discover it's a huge mistake. This is also why your friend at the lab suddenly looked about a year older recently.

There's a red convertible outside my building with the license plate 'DADS MNY'.

Hey Rob, sorry it took me a while to get back to you! Sure, I'd love to see WALL-E opening weekend! Are you still doing that, or...?

Someday I'll be rich enough to hire Nate Silver to help make all my life decisions. 'Should I sleep with her?' 'Well, I'm showing a 35% chance it will end badly.'

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

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

It's not going to break the fan, bouncing a rubber ball off the wall isn't going to dent it, and the roof can hold me just fine. You LIED!

What? Oh, no, the 'Enchanted' soundtrack was just playing because Pandora's algorithms are terrible. [silence] ... (quietly) That's how you knooooooow ...

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

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

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

Do you make a distinction between shallots, scallops, and scallions? If you use all three words, do they all have different meanings, all the same, or are two the same and one different?

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

We're working to make sure the images are as up-to-date and accurate as possible, with a minimum number of sponsored galaxies.

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

Gen-Z got a chunk of the Carboniferous, and now all their memes are about how pathetic and small today's dragonflies are.

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

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.

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

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

And let's be honest, it's more like two and a half stars. Proxima is barely a star and barely bound to the system.

The malaria party was David's idea

'All time machine systems nominal ... T-minus ten ... eleven ...'

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

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

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

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

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

An hour later: SUGGESTION: LICK HER NIPPLE MORE.

We should really start calculating it earlier, but until the end of December we're always too busy trying to figure out which day Christmas will fall on.

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.

I'm so bad at carrying a tune, those 'find a song by humming its melody' websites throw an HTTP 406 error as soon as I start to hum.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

The strongest incentive we have to develop faster-than-light travel is that it would let us apologize in advance.

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

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

Wait, damn, I think I spotted a new email on the last refresh.

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.

My first words were 'These were my first words; what were yours?'

No one wants an explanation more than us. Except Ms. Garofalo.

Update: Santa has been destroyed by the range safety officer.

Type IIII error: Mistaking tally marks for Roman numerals

After decades of studying the curve and the procedure that generates it, the consensus explanation is "it's just like that."

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.

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

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

"Mostly it means that I'm acutely aware that the kid one table over coughed as the server walked past with our food."

Of the two Garfields, you wouldn't think the cat would turn out to be the more compelling presidential speechwriter, but there you go.

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".

It's important to make sure your analysis destroys as much information as it produces.

A partial eclipse is like a cool sunset. A total eclipse is like someone broke the sky.

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

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

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

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

Low gravity can cause bone loss, so we're pleased to report that, since we initiated capsule motion, the number of bones in each crew member has been steadily increasing.

NASCAR removed the passenger seats because drivers hated how astronauts kept riding along with them and loudly announcing "Ahh, what a nice and relaxing drive."

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.

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

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

"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."

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

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

"It's not an influenza, but the onset has notes of the '09 H1N1 strain." "Ah yes, that was a good year for H1N1."

I've looked into this, and I can't figure out a way to do it cheaply. And I guess it wouldn't be sanitary.

This is something we all need to work on, but especially you all.

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

I'm like a vampire, except I'm not crossing that threshold even if you invite me.

She's so fat the attraction goes up as the CUBE of the distance instead of the square

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

Plus, you have to control for the fact that some people are into being blindfolded.

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

I need an extension for my research project because I spent all month trying to figure out whether learning Dvorak would help me type it faster.

I believe in getting immunity the old-fashioned way: By letting a bat virus take control of my lungs and turn my face into a disgusting plague fountain while my immune system desperately Googles 'how to make spike protein antibodies'.

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

There's a heated debate over whether the big island of Tierra del Fuego should qualify for membership.

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

A video can have a log scale that's misaligned with both the time AND space axes.

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

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.

Check it out--when I tug the C-terminal tail, the binding tunnel squeezes!

Current (water) running through the water (wires) causes it to boil, increasing the pressure (voltage), but resisting (impeding) the flow of hydroelectricity (water currents). This is the basis for Ohm's law.

2030: "I just bought a house for one bitcoin. No, it's the equivalent of a dollar. Houses are often transferred for a nominal fee because the buyer is taking responsibility for containing the holo-banshees in the attic."

For those of you also taking Game Theory, your grade in that class will be based on how close your grade on this exam is to 80% of the average.

If the celestial sphere were mapped to the Earth's surface, astronomy would get a LOT easier; you'd just need a magnifying glass.

In the future, every single pipeline will lead to the bowl of a giant blender, and we'll all just show up with a bucket each day to take our share of the resulting smoothie.

All in all, I give this year a C-. There were no aurora visible from my house and that comet evaporated. They'd better not cancel the 2017 eclipse.

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

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

That's my hat! You took my hat!

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.

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

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

I hope no automatic doors I know read this. I would be so embarrassed.

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.

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!

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

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

While weather control is typically thought of as a superpower, the unconscious ability of astronomers and astrophotographers to summon clouds is more properly classified as a curse.

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

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

The Hammer + Captain Tightpants == Captain Hammerpants?

There's some flexibility depending on your standards for measuring runtime and the various special editions. If you still want to have a party, I'm sure you can find some combination that works.

When they moved production from New Zealand to the UK and switched from the runny white centers to the thick, frosting-like filling, it got way harder to cook them scrambled.

"Do you feel like the answer depends on whether you're currently in the hole, versus when you refer to the events later after you get out? Assuming you get out."

The good news is that if the number of work and friend relationships you have exceeds your willingness to do the bare minimum to keep up with everyone's life events and stuff, one way or another that problem eventually solves itself.

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

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

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

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

Easier to escape: n-layered nested quotes or an iron maiden?

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

Astronomy (or "astrology" in British English) is the study of ...

"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."

And she's gonna feel like a jerk when she realizes it was actually Under Pressure.

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

The floor should be slightly curved, but we haven't figured out artificial gravity yet, so for now we just added a trace intoxicating gas to the air that messes with your inner ear and gives you a sense that the ground is tilting away from you.

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.

The same people who spend their weekends at the Blogger Reenactment Festivals will whine about the anachronisms in historical movies, but no one else will care.

I wonder what 2008 meme will go bizarrely mainstream in 2009 like Rickrolling did 2007-2008. I Accidentally <noun>? Yo dawg? Place your bets now!

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

Yeah, my math teacher back in high school set up the system to try to teach us something or other, but the 100% rate was unbelievably good, so I engineered a hostile takeover of his bank and now use it to make extra cash on the side.

I guess the engineers who built my dishwasher MIGHT have some insight into how to load it, but instead of reading the booklet they gave me, it seems easier to experiment for years and then get in arguments so heated that I get banned from Quora.

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

We've learned that weird spacing and diacritics in the methodology description are apparently the key to good research; luckily, we've developed an AI tool to help us figure out where to add them.

The theory finally unifies cosmic inflation and regular inflation.

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

Although really, the damage was done when the party planners took the hole punch to the elevator ribbon to hang up the sign.

413 nanohertz, by the way.

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

Far off to the right of the chart is the Helvetica Scenario.

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

I wonder if I still have time to go shoot a short film with Kevin Bacon.

General solutions get you a 50% tip.

The only other Wikipedia vandalism that I would feel zero remorse about is editing the article on active US militia groups to replace "militia" with "fanclub".

They're standing at the lip of the canyon, which isn't clear at all.

Calligraphy exam: Write down the number 37, spelled out, nicely.

The only post to achieve perfect balance between the four was a hilarious joke about Mark Zuckerberg getting caught using a pseudonym to sneak past the TSA.

Merry Christmas from xkcd!

IT'S ALL REAL

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.

They'll pick music and culture that they know annoys you. Building in behavioral easter eggs is a fair retaliation!

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

Numbers can be tricky. On the day of my 110th birthday, I'll be one day younger than John Tukey was on his.

Alternate method: convince them to pretend it's an Etch-a-Sketch and try to erase it.

Apple uses automated schnapps IVs.

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

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

I THINK EVERYONE INVOLVED HERE IS CUTE.

Okay, Lance. For entry into the college bowl, spell 'Throbbing'

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

I'm going to drive this Netherlands joke so far into the ground they'll have to build levees around it to keep the sea out.

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.

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.

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'.

Frankly, I see no difference between thee and a summer's day. Only Ron Paul offers a TRUE alternative!

We should probably talk about this before the wedding.

Washington state is seeing great success with reintroducing the Columbia River Basin subpopulation. We cannot allow them to further widen the interstate bun gap.

Trivia: Elaine is actually her middle name.

You know I've always hated her.

"How does the spring not run out almost immediately?" "We pull it back REALLY far."

The Roanoke Lost Colonists founded Roanoke, the Franklin Expedition reached the Pacific in 2009 when the Northwest Passage opened, and Jimmy Hoffa currently heads the Teamsters Union--he just started going by 'James'.

It's like sigma summation notation, except instead of summing the argument over all values of i, you 2 the argument over all values of 2.

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

A century later, the harrowing flight of the survivors from Oregon was dramatized in a popular video game.

It's a beautiful day in the neighborhood!

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.

You're probably thinking, 'has it been a decade?' It's been over thirteen years, buddy.

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

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

ISSUE: If we wait long enough, the Earth will eventually be consumed by the Sun. WORKAROUND: None.

This is almost as bad as the time I signed up for a purely partisan fishing expedition.

Some lava around the piercing site is normal, but keep an eye out for spreading earthquakes and eruptive activity that might indicate rifting.

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

It's not just time zones and leap seconds. SI seconds on Earth are slower because of relativity, so there are time standards for space stuff (TCB, TGC) that use faster SI seconds than UTC/Unix time. T2 - T1 = [God doesn't know and the Devil isn't telling.]

'It seems like it's still alive, Professor.' 'Yeah, a big one like this can keep running around for a few billion years after you remove the head."

I recently had someone ask me to go get a computer and turn it on so I could restart it. He refused to move further in the script until I said I had done that.

He says this is the year of Linux on the desktop! The world of Windows will fade any moment now!

Phylogeneticists are working on identifying and notifying its next of kin.

First comes blood / Then we perish / Then comes Death in his Eternity Carriage.

"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."

Handy exam trick: when you know the answer but not the correct derivation, derive blindly forward from the givens and backward from the answer, and join the chains once the equations start looking similar. Sometimes the graders don't notice the seam.

For scientists, this can be the hardest thing about dreams.

To really expand your mind try some noncartesian porn. Edwin Abbot Abbott has nothing on 'Girls on Girls in Tightly Closed Nonorientable Spaces'.

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.

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

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.

"My parents were both omnitaurs, which is how I got interested in recombination," said the normal human.

So what do we do when we get to base 10? Do we use A, B, C, etc? No: Numbers larger than about 3.6 million are simply illegal.

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

[later] I can't believe how bad corruption has become, especially given that our league split off from the statewide one a month ago SPECIFICALLY to protest this kind of flagrantly biased judging.

'Wait, our state has mail voting. The forms are literally on the kitchen table.' 'Not now, I'm busy researching which channels have sharks in them.'

Check it out; I've had sex with someone who's had sex with someone who's written a paper with Paul Erdős!

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

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

At some point, compression becomes an aesthetic design choice. Luckily, SVG is a really flexible format, so there's no reason it can't support vector JPEG artifacts.

'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.'

The Python environmental protection agency wants to seal it in a cement chamber, with pictorial messages to future civilizations warning them about the danger of using sudo to install random Python packages.

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

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

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

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

On one hand, you'll never be able to convince your parents to switch. On the other hand, you'll never be able to convince your parents to switch!

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

"Epsihootamoo doopsiquorps" --the Schrödinger equation for the hydrogen atom

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

Unless the CS students finish the robot revolution before you finish the cephalopod one.

Researchers just found the gene responsible for mistakenly thinking we've found the gene for specific things. It's the region between the start and the end of every chromosome, plus a few segments in our mitochondria.

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

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

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

I had a really hard time not writing '... profit!'

Backward-compatible with many existing cables, and can connect directly to phones or tablets if you press them down hard enough.

Especially you mouseover-text readers. You're the best. <3

Wikipedia's role as brain-extension, while a little troubling, is also really cool.

Cloud computing has a ways to go.

As my standard, I use going to sleep at midnight and waking up at 8 AM.

Implausible, did you say? Sorry, couldn't quite hear you from all the way up heeeeeeeeere!

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

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

Fun fact: The standard North American NAD83 coordinate system is misaligned from the actual Earth, off-center by about 7 feet. Someone knows where I am, and I'm in the wrong place.

No more, no less

"Actually, Jupiter already has a very impressive ring system!" --someone who knows Jupiter is within earshot

Prank #11: Boston

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

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

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!

Knuth Paper-Stack Notation: Write down the number on pages. Stack them. If the stack is too tall to fit in the room, write down the number of pages it would take to write down the number. THAT number won't fit in the room? Repeat. When a stack fits, write the number of iterations on a card. Pin it to the stack.

We're also stuck with blurry, juddery, slow-panning 24fps movies forever because (thanks to 60fps home video) people associate high framerates with camcorders and cheap sitcoms, and thus think good framerates look 'fake'.

It's cool how, when there's a number lots of people are curious about, but which isn't easy to measure, some random guess will get cited everywhere and become the universally quoted value. Unrelatedly, did you know there are 850 trillion waves in the ocean?

Platonic solids for my real friends and real solids for my platonic friends!

Hey, are you friends with any hamsters? This kite needs a passenger.

Cyanobacteria wiped out nearly all life on Earth once before, and they can do it again!

These pranks happen all the time. English doesn't allow one-syllable words to end in a lax vowel, so writers on The Simpsons decided to mess with future linguists by introducing the word "meh."

[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.

Can this PLEASE be drawing with replacement?

It's easier to be an asshole to words than to people.

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

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

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

The Super Bowl is actually an elaborate ruse, concocted by a shadowy group in the mid sixties for this purpose. The 'watch it for the ads' addition was a master stroke.

It's not our fault we caught a group on their way home from a geography bee. And they taught us that Uzbekistan is one of the world's two doubly-landlocked countries!

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.

[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.'

When designing an interface, imagine that your program is all that stands between the user and hot, sweaty, tangled-bedsheets-fingertips-digging-into-the-back sex.

Plot twist: Thanks to [mumble mumble] second-order [mumble] Rayleigh-Taylor [mumble] turbulent [mumble] shear, it turns out powered flight is way EASIER on Mars!

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

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

It's not far from the sign marking the exact latitude and longitude of the Earth's core.

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

You might want to bring your frost-sensitive plants in from the patio. The high-level aerosols may result in short-term cooling across the entire backyard.

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

Call me, MAYBE.

Poisson distributions have no value over negative numbers

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

Someday, some big historical event will happen during the DST changeover, and all the tick-tock articles chronicling how it unfolded will have to include a really annoying explanation next to their timelines.

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

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

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

I also enjoy Reverse Regular Golf. I've been playing for years all across the country and I'm still on the first hole.

Seventh year: Perfectly coherent words, but in the pet's language, not mine.

God, she's such a whore.

The penis varies in size when flaccid and is pretty consistently about yea big when erect. Anyway, back to the sitcom one-liners and the constant flow of spam.

Sounds fine. I looked up the Academy, and it says on their MySpace page that their journal is peer-viewed and downloaded biannually.

Small sewing machines are sewing machines that are smaller than a sewing machine. A sewing machine is larger than a small sewing machine, but quieter than a loud sewing machine.

This is true. The lyrics are ridiculous.

Well, for some value of 'actually work'.

Welcome to the International Space Station Exclamation Point!

I was, at least at the start of this disastrous game night, your friend.

Mathematicians quickly determined that it spells ANT BNECN, an unusual theoretical dish which was not successfully cooked until Andrew Wiles made it for breakfast in the 1990s.

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

"While I try to do my part to destroy the environment, I try not to focus too much on individual responsibility. By pushing for broad policy changes, we can collectively do far more damage to the biosphere than any of us could on our own."

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

Not to be confused with Serious PuTTY, the Windows terminal client where everything is in Impact.

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

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.

I won't eat invertebrates, because I can fight a skeleton, but I have no idea what kind of spooky warrior a squid leaves behind.

2078: He announces that he's finally making the jump from screen+irssi to tmux+weechat.

I'm leaning toward fifteen. There are a lot of them.

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

Effect strength => [unstoppable] | Effect range => [2 miles] | Effect duration => [1 year]

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.'

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

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

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

Which, at one point, led to a study showing that LSD produces no more hallucinations than a placebo.

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

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

Or so I hope?

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

It's a long way down.

This is the biggest breakthrough since astronomers noticed that the little crosshairs around red giant stars starting to burn helium are all the same size.

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

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

Your IDE's color may vary.

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

Having a positive attitude is almost tautologically good for your mental health, and extreme stress can hurt your immune system, but that doesn't mean you should feel like shit for feeling like shit.

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.

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

If you ever hear "Wait, is that Kim Dotcom's new project? I'm really excited about it and already signed up, although I'm a little nervous about whether everyone should hand over control of their medical...", it's time to dig a bunker in your backyard.

I don't trust mantle/core geologists because I suspect that, if they ever get a chance to peel away the Earth's crust, they'll do it in a heartbeat.

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

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.

Though 100 years is longer than a lot of our resources.

If you want in on the fun, map a key on your keyboard to the sequence U+0041 U+0020 U+FFFD (or U+0021 U+0020 U+FFFD for the exclamation point version), and then no update can never take this away from you.

For the sake of simplicity, gardeners are assumed to move through Euclidean space--neglecting the distortion from general relativity--unless they are in the vicinity of a Schwarzschild Orchid.

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.

Although the oral exam for the doctorate was just 'can you do that weird laugh?'

The secret fourth kind is 'we applied a standard theory to their map of every tree and got some suspicious results.'

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

And even though it all went wrong / I'll stand before the lord of song / with nothing on my tongue but 'I don't understand, I swear I backed up my keyboard config before messing with it'

My shooting will improve over the short term, but over the long term the universe will take more shots.

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

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

This discovery was key to his demonstration of regular/goofy symmetry violation, which won him gold in the theory portion of the X Games.

U+2A0B ⨋ Mathematicians need to calm down

Or maybe the slide is like Aslan, and gets taller as I do (except without the feeling of discomfort when I reach my teens and suddenly get the Christ stuff.)

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

Here in the entomology department, we have a simple two-step formula for answering any question: (1) ants are cool, and (2) we forgot the question because we were thinking about ants.

After meeting with a few of the subjects, the IRB actually recommended that you stop stressing out so much about safety guidelines.

I wonder what surviving human held the record before balloons (excluding edge cases like jumping gaps on a mountain bridge). Probably it was someone falling from a cliff into snow or water, but maybe it involved something weird like a gunpowder explosion or volcano.

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."

First prize is a free ticket to the kissing booth.

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

The one time I tried, I got hit by a slinky going down at double speed.

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

Maybe we're all gonna die, but we're gonna die in *really cool ways*.

NASA prefers to say that their rovers are 'looking for signs of past life on Mars' and not 'ghost hunting.'

You should talk to the girl down the hall; I think you'd like her. Lemme know if you find out why she's ordering all those colored plastic balls.

Premed: "Does this count for a physics credit? Can we shorten the string so I can get it done faster? And can we do one where it hits me in the face? I gotta do a thing for first aid training right after."

Controls are a little hard to figure out.

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

In 1899, people were walking around shouting '23' at each other and laughing, and confused reporters were writing articles trying to figure out what it meant.

The Banach-Tarski theorem was actually first developed by King Solomon, but his gruesome attempts to apply it set back set theory for centuries.

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."

I've been working my way through this 1950s podcast by someone named John Tolkien called 'Lord of the Rings'--it's a deep dive into this fictional world he created. Good stuff, really bingeable!

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.

June 21st, 365, the date of the big Mediterranean earthquake and tsunami, lived in infamy for a few centuries before fading. Maybe the trick is a catchy rhyme; the '5th of November' thing is still going strong over 400 years later.

Never bring tequila to a key-signing party.

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

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