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

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RIP, Gary.

After my absent-mindedness resulted in a bad posterboard-related stomachache, I learned to do the sign-making place last.

We were disappointed that the rocket didn't make a THOOOONK noise when it went into the tube, but we're setting up big loudspeakers for future launches to add the sound effect.

IMO the thymus is one of the coolest organs and we should really use it in metaphors more.

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

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

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.

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

People say setting of fireworks indoors is dangerous, but I looked at their energy release and it's like 10^-40 foe; totally negligible.

'How long are you going to keep this up?' 'Statistically, only four or five more decades.'

I was going to record an album with that cover under the name "PINK FTFY", so it'd come after them on the store CD rack. But at this point music stores are just rooms where CDs are set out to age before they're thrown away, so probably nobody would see it.

Inappropriate places for the Penis Game include baby showers and terrorist attacks

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

Lambda calculus? More like SHAMbda calculus, amirite?

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.

Anadromous fish are more vulnerable in rivers, since the lack of salt means you can quickly crack passwords using rainbow trout tables.

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

The rarest of all clouds is the altocumulenticulostratonimbulocirruslenticulomammanoctilucent cloud, caused by an interaction between warm moist air, cool dry air, cold slippery air, cursed air, and a cloud of nanobots.

Obama has been writing Lincoln/Obama erotic fan fiction on his secret livejournal. Excerpt: Lincoln lay back on the bed, nude save for his trademark stovepipe hat. 'Tell me,' he purred seductively, as he and Obama formed a more perfect union. 'When you come, is it 10% ethanol?'

The most important quantity for meteorologists is of course the product of latent pressure and temperostrophic enthalpy, though 'how nice the weather is' is a close second.

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

Ants have reverse chemtrails--regular citizens spraying chemicals everywhere they go to control the government.

For even more info, see blarbl(2)(3) and birb(3ahhaha I'm kidding, just Google it like a normal person.

Everything is a cloud application; the ping times just vary a lot.

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

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

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

This works on pretty much every level.

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.

Eventually they agreed to "an auto-retracting dog leash with one end clipped to your house, so you can press the button on the handle and water-ski home."

There are some papers arguing that there's a volcanic component, but I personally think they're just feeling guilty and trying to cover the trail.

If we find one of those tire dumps, the next time he tries to get his truck back we can just retreat and let him have it.

If it's over water, and you can't get a boat or revise the rules to preserve the makeout, there is no helping you.

You will be led to judgement like lambs to the slaughter--a simile whose existence, I might add, will not do your species any favors.

There's a river flowing through the ocean

[After setting your car on fire] Listen, your car's temperature has changed before.

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

And it doesn't pop up a box every time asking you to use your real name. In fact, there's no way to set your name at all. You just have to keep reminding people who you are.

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

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.

Luckily for my interpretation, no precincts were won by the Green Party.

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

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

I sympathize with the TPP protagonist because I, too, have progressed through a surprising number of stages of life despite spending entire days stuck against simple obstacles.

Small devices use two-prong USB-AC, but there's also a three-prong version with a USB-B plug as the ground.

Today's consumers who order their drones off the internet don't know the joy of going out in nature and returning with a drone that you caught yourself, whose angry owners you fought off with your own two hands.

That eggplant is in something of a flaccid state.

Why would anyone ever, ever say that? Please, nobody ever say that.

One of these days me and Joey Comeau will get around to subverting the hetero-normative paradigm and fixing all this.

The few dozen doors that have little Christmas trees on them are a nice touch.

Googling inevitably reveals that my problem is caused by a known bug triggered by doing [the exact combination of things I want to do]. I can fix it, or wait a few years until I don't want that combination of things anymore, using the kitchen timer until then.

When you Google an error message and it gets no results, you can be pretty sure you've found a clue to the location of Martin's sword.

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

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

The foil on the toothpick represents the blue flash.

It was their main recruiting poster, hung nearly ten feet up a wall! This means the hackers have LADDER technology! Are we headed for a future where everyone has to pay $50 for one of those locked plexiglass poster covers? More after the break ...

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

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

For years, I took the wrong lesson from that Monster Cable experiment and only listened to my music through alligator-clipped coat hangers.

Of course, Penny Arcade has already mocked themselves for this. They don't care.

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

"Ok, team. We have a little under 10,000 years before closest approach to figure out how to destroy Barnard's Star." "Why, does it pose a threat to the Solar System?" "No. It's just an asshole."

I've seen advertisers put their URLs on chalkboards, encircled with a DNE. They went unerased for months. If you see this, feel free to replace the URL with xkcd.com.

Our brains have just one scale, and we resize our experiences to fit.

A big obstacle in experimenting with the mind's dream-simulation-engine is holding onto the details as you wake up. With TCMP you can bring back any information you want.

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

Twister would've been a much better movie if they'd cut out the bad-guy storm chaser and all the emotional romance crap. All you need for a good movie are tornados and scientists. Actually, that's all you need for anything.

Once the lockdown is over, let's all get together and swap starters!

If you don't have an extension cord I can get that too. Because we're friends! Right?

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.

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

When you get to hell, tell smallpox we say hello.

After determining that his body was full of pipes carrying iron-rich fluid, our current theory is that the dagger-shaped object precipitated within the wound.

He probably just poops over the side of the sleigh.

Gödel should do an article on which branches of math have the lowest average theorem number.

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.

Mantle plumes explain Hawaii, Yellowstone, Iceland, the East African Rift, the Adirondack uplift, the Permian extinction, the decline of Rome, the DB Cooper hijacking, and the balrog in Moria. Those little hills of sand in your yard are caused by antle plumes.

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

I laugh at the software as if I'm 100% confident that it's 2019.

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

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

Saying 'what kind of an idiot doesn't know about the Yellowstone supervolcano' is so much more boring than telling someone about the Yellowstone supervolcano for the first time.

Ron Paul wants to put the New Republic back on the Corusca gem standard.

"I've always wanted to run naked through town, but I don't want to get in trouble with the king or be remembered by history as a weirdo. I wonder how I could ... EUREKA!"

Sure, you can talk about per-capita adjustment, but if you want to solve the problem, it's obvious that this is the group you need to focus on.

By my count, only 48 of the 158 minutes in Live Free or Die Hard have action. That's pathetic, guys. Crank is better, but needs a bigger budget and more Summer Glau.

This is a story all about how I started drinking.

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

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.'

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

We've gotten him up to 20% milk and cookies through an aggressive public campaign, but that seems to be his dietary limit. Anything above that and he starts developing nutritional deficiencies.

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

'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!'

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

Coconuts are so far down to the left they couldn't be fit on the chart. Ever spent half an hour trying to open a coconut with a rock? Fuck coconuts.

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

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.

"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."

Good to be a little wary of advice that sounds too much like a self pep talk.

My connection to it goes way back, to my early days, when I was just a cloud of primordial hydrogen collapsing in the darkness of space.

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

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

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

Her daughter is named Help I'm trapped in a driver's license factory.

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

I'm happy with my Kindle 2 so far, but if they cut off the free Wikipedia browsing, I plan to show up drunk on Jeff Bezos's lawn and refuse to leave.

This site requires Sun Java 6.0.0.1 (32-bit) or higher. You have Macromedia Java 7.3.8.1¾ (48-bit). Click here [link to java.com main page] to download an installer which will run fine but not really change anything.

Can you stop glaring at me like that? It makes me feel really ironic.

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

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

If you've never had sex, this is what it feels like. Complete with the brief feeling of satisfaction, followed by ennui, followed by getting bored and trying to make it happen again.

On January 26th, 2274 Mars days into the mission, NASA declared Spirit a 'stationary research station', expected to stay operational for several more months until the dust buildup on its solar panels forces a final shutdown.

I hope we can stop them

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.

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

My theory predicts that, at high enough energies, FRBs and perytons become indistinguishable because the detector burns out.

Actual actual reality: nobody cares about his secrets. (Also, I would be hard-pressed to find that wrench for $5.)

We could organize a nationwide old-photo-album search, but the real Worst McFly is probably lost to time.

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

ThisadpaidforbythecounciltopromoteMicrosoftandChristianity. Remember, The Bible is Closed Source.

And then a second one, to drain the sea.

Did he just go crazy and jump out the window?

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

Party Mode also enables the feature, but reverses the slider.

The only blood these contracts are signed in is from me cutting my hand trying to open the goddamn CD case.

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

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

Fermions are weird about each other in a standoffish way. Integer-spin particles are weird about each other in a 'stand uncomfortably close while talking' kind of way.

Terms I'm going to start using: The Large Dipper, great potatoes, the Big Hadron Collider, and Large Orphan Annie.

Great, and you JUST finished paying off the settlement over the Wayne Coyne hamster ball incident.

You shouldn't look directly at a partial eclipse because of the damage that can be caused by improperly aligning the solar-lunar orbital plane with the orbital bones around your eye.

Despite years of effort by my physics professors to normalize it, deep down I remain convinced that 'dynamical' is not really a word.

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

There's this idea that emoji are bad for communication because they replace ambiguity and nuance with a limited set of preselected emotions, but it doesn't really survive a collision with real-world usage of the thinking face or upside-down smiley.

I hear that there are actual lyrics later on in Land of 1,000 Dances, but other than the occasional 'I said,' I've never listened long enough to hear any of them.

It has been −2,147,483,648 days since our last integer overflow.

I get that there are security reasons for the schedule, but this is like the ONE problem we have where the right answer is both easy and straightforward. If we can't figure it out, maybe we should just give up and just replace all the portraits on the bills with that weird pyramid eye thing.

I occasionally do this with mile markers on the highway.

I started to do the tables for more famous people but it got really depressing and morbid and I had to go outside. Hat guy wins again.

Gotten the Ferris wheel operator's attention

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

This is actually pencil on paper, just inverted and colored

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

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

Time to dance in front of Mary Jane! If I'm lucky, she'll turn out not to practice pre-copulatory sexual cannibalism!

The projection for those who think the Mercator projection gives people a distorted idea of how big Greenland is, but a very accurate idea of how big it SHOULD be.

A really mean prank you can play on someone who's picky about words is to add a 'definitely->definitively' autocorrect rule to their keyboard.

Each SCAPDFATIAT point increases the chance that the process will involve the phrase 'by the next business day.'

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.

Honestly feel a little sheepish about the amount of time and effort I spent confirming "yes, the vaccine helps protect people from getting sick and dying" but I guess everyone needs a hobby.

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

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

Poisson distributions have no value over negative numbers

Every downhill walk is a waterslide that might have been.

'Touch!' 'Nope, I sighed and stared at you with resignation, so I regained emotional right-of-way.'

Sometimes I hate the internet. Sometimes it makes me happy that 'The Tubes' has become slang for the internet so quickly.

In the latest round, 9-year-old Muhammad Ali beat 10-year-old JFK at air hockey, while Secretariat lost the hot-dog-eating crown to 12-year-old Ken Jennings. Meanwhile, in a huge upset, 11-year-old Martha Stewart knocked out the adult Ronda Rousey.

Every year: 'It's <year>--I want my jetpack [and also my free medical care covering all my jetpack-related injuries]!'

"So their universe wouldn't have the iconic photo of a screaming Truman being hoisted aloft by the newspaper-printing machinery..."

Hey, why stop at our house? We could burn down ALL these houses for the insurance money.

Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. There is no road out of this oblivion; we must embrace it. We must join with the darkness. Ba'al the Annihilator offers us no happiness, no answers, naught but the cold embrace of the void. To imagine any other end is delusion. We must give in to the will of Ba'al, for he will one day consume us and our world alike. I therefore call on Congress to fully fund space exploration, and to join with Ba'al, the Eater of Souls. Thank you.

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

'Is it worth anything?' 'I dunno, is the answer to that question worth another $5?'

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.

v3.0.2: Hey, if anyone still using this app is headed to the beach, can you stop at 4th and River St and grab the sunscreen from my car? Trunk should be unlocked. Thanks!

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

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

'The world's greatest [whatever]' is subjective, but 'One of the world's greatest [whatever]s' is clearly objective. Anyway, that's why I got you this 'one of the world's greatest moms' mug!

'So, uh, we did the green study again and got no link. It was probably a--' 'RESEARCH CONFLICTED ON GREEN JELLY BEAN/ACNE LINK; MORE STUDY RECOMMENDED!'

Oh no, my marshmallow became tidally locked!

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

Bonus question: Where is London located? (a) The British Isles (b) Great Britain and Northern Ireland (c) The UK (d) Europe (or 'the EU') (e) Greater London

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

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

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

'Don't worry, I can do it in under a minute.' 'Yes, I've noticed.'

'It's either 'your mom' jokes or me' 'Then I, like so many men before me, must reluctantly choose your mom.'

Theranos partnership: Sorry, we know, but we signed the contract back before all the stuff and the lawyers say we can't back out, so just try to keep your finger away from the bottom of the phone.

This digital music thing will probably reach its endgame sometime in the next decade or so. These are very exciting times.

Bonus strip: just read the rightmost panels straight down.

But the past was much too cramped!

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

I'm as surprised as you!

Listen, they request that you stop submitting a listing for your house labeled 'WHERE YOU BROKE MY HEART'.

The social media reaction to this asteroid announcement has been sharply negative. Care to respond?

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

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

I literally could care less.

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

"There's one set of foot-p's cause I was totes carrying you, bro!" said Jesus seconds before I punched him.

*refresh* Aww, still in Kalamazoo. *refresh* Aww, still in Kalamazoo.

It's like a half-solved cryptogram where the solution is a piece of FORTH code written by someone who doesn't know FORTH.

Roundly-condemned headlinese initiative shuttered indefinitely.

Guess who has two thumbs and spent the night in an ER after trying to rescue a kitten that ran under his car at a stoplight and climbed up into the engine compartment? And, thanks to antibiotics, will continue having two thumbs? THIS GUY. (P.S. kitten is safe!)

Sadly, this is a true story. At least I learned about the OS X 'say' command.

Wait, I can fix this. Picture another field. In the middle sits the only creature the first creature is afraid of. Now just-- wait, where did THAT one go?

You can come on in, we're all fully vaccinated. Except the spare room off the living room. Don't go in there, we're not fully vaccinated in there.

Brace yourself--the chirp gets pretty weird.

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.

Squaring the circle is really easy with some good clamps.

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

'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.'

Although not permanently.

#pugglewumper Tashari got me some ink pens! I've been experimenting with them.

"Isn't the original Jurassic Park your favorite movie of all time?" "Yes, but that's because I like dinosaurs and I WANT there to be an island full of them. If John Hammond's lab had been breeding serial killers in creepy masks, I wouldn't have watched!" "Wait, are you sure? That could actually be good." "Ok, I WOULD watch the scenes where Jeff Goldblum tries to convince a bunch of executives that the park is a bad idea."

"I'm selling all my analogies at auction tomorrow, and that witch over there will give you 20 beans if you promise on pain of death to win them for her." "What if SEVERAL people promised witches they'd win, creating some kind of a ... squeeze? Gosh, you could make a lot of–" "Don't be silly! That probably never happens."

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

Lucky. In MY dream, all the people who grew up loving The Giving Tree paired up with all the students who had weird dreams after reading The Metamorphosis. That one was more confusing.

But surely I owe you an accurate answer!

And it says a lot about you that when your friends jump off a bridge en masse, your first thought is apparently 'my friends are all foolish and I won't be like them' and not 'are my friends ok?'.

Or if you replace your car, we'll be happy to set it on fire again so you can take another crack at getting that shot.

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.

"Radians Fahrenheit or radians Celsius?" "Uh, sorry, gotta go!"

Bruce Schneier believes safewords are fundamentally insecure and recommends that you ask your partner to stop via public key signature.

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

Evidence suggests the 1899 transactions occurred as part of a global event centered around a deity associated with the lotus flower.

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

If you encounter a hex bolt, but you only brought screwdrivers, you can try sandwiching the head of the bolt between two parallel screwdriver shafts, squeezing the screwdrivers together with a hand at either end, then twisting. It doesn't work and it's a great way to hurt yourself, but you can try it!

A circle with an A in it means that the circuit has committed a sin and has been marked as punishment.

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

Although bees with tires would be kinda funny.

Detectives say the key to tracking down the source of the kites was a large wall map covered in thumbtacks and string. 'It's the first time that method has ever actually worked,' said a spokesperson.

Great, LO-M. Do you speak Bocce? I'm supposed to find one that speaks Bocce.

IATA stands for International AirporT Abbreviation.

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

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.

During the most recent glacial maximum, it's believed that land bridges extended from the surfaces and connected several of the spheres together.

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

Ingress: Foursquare With Space Noises.

'Beyond that lies a vale of fire through which my vision cannot penetrate' is the kind of fun thing geologists, heliophysicists, and early universe cosmologists have a lot of opportunities to say.

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...?

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

It's okay, they scan the serial numbers and make sure you can't deposit the same bill more than once.

We don't need to do a clinical trial of this change because the standard of care is to adopt new ideas without doing clinical trials.

This hostname is going in dozens of remote config files. Changing a kid's name is comparatively easy!

I mean, it's not like we could just demand to see the code that's governing our lives. What right do we have to poke around in Facebook's private affairs like that?

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

Never bring tequila to a key-signing party.

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

You think, 'okay, THIS is an ideal use case for hardlinks!' but then 6 months later you're doing some extremely cursed Google search like 'javascript ext4' and wondering where things went wrong.

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

Geologists claim it's because the earlier Cenozoic used to be called the Tertiary, but that's just a ruse to hide the secret third geologic period, between the Neogene and the Quaternary, that they won't tell us about.

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.

Our models fall apart where the three theories overlap; we're unable to predict what happens when a nanometer-sized squirrel eats a grapefruit with the mass of the sun.

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

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

Einstein was WRONG when he said that provisional patent #39561 represented a novel gravel-sorting technique and should be approved by the Patent Office.

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

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

There's planned downtime every night when we turn on the Roomba and it runs over the cord.

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

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.

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

The AARP puts the average age of a first-time grandparent close to 50, and the CDC has some data. But I don't have first-parent age distributions for specific names, or generational first-child age correlations, so the dotted line is just a guess. Still, let's be honest: No further research is really *needed.*

Thank you for teaching us how big our world is by sharing so many of your own.

Love and circuit analysis, hand in hand at last.

I hear many of you finally have smooth Flash support, but me and my Intel card are still waiting on a kernel patch somewhere in the pipeline before we can watch Jon Stewart smoothly.

I take the view that "open-faced sandwiches" are not sandwiches, but all other physical objects are.

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.

Two Hedwig references, an obscure Joey Comeau reference, and a girl with a mohawk. Yes.

You know what happens when you assert--you make an ass out of the emergency response team.

But he has a hat AND a toolbox! Where could someone planning a heist get THOSE?

Unsafe vehicles, hills, and philosophy go hand in hand.

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

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

If an anatomical structure is named for a person, it means they were the only person to have it. Pierre Paul Broca had a special area of his brain that created powerful magnetic fields, enabling him to do 19th century fMRI research.

Abel and Steve would've been fine! I like Steve!

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

Careful mathematical analysis demonstrates small-scale irregularities in Gaussian distribution

The weirdest quirk of the Borda count is that Jean-Charles de Borda automatically gets one point; luckily this has no consequences except in cases of extremely low turnout.

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

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

Try our bottomless drinks and fall forever!

2040s: RNA formed the basis for life each of the five known times it arose on the early Earth.

If things are too quiet, try asking a couple of friends whether "a couple" should always mean "two". As with the question of how many spaces should go after a period, it can turn acrimonious surprisingly fast unless all three of them agree.

It's possible to do sea navigation without a compass, but you'll have to get some spoilers from the Polynesians.

Don't forget to add another term for "probability that the Modified Bayes' Theorem is correct."

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

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

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

Even governmental elevator inspectors get bored halfway through asking where the building office is.

Listen, you need to get over your reluctance to permanently alter a game. Now roll 2d6 to determine how many ounces of soda to spill into the box.

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.

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'.

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

The bottom of the list remains unchanged. Poor Rutherford Birchard Hayes.

Our retina display features hundreds of pixels per inch in the central fovea region.

I'm sure the building inspectors will approve my design once they finally manage to escape.

The New Worlds Mission is already trying to get funding for this, but NASA sponsored their proposal, so it will be hard to catch the telescope people by surprise with it.

When my great grandfather designed the Titanic and it hit an iceberg and sank, he didn't sit around moping. He took those lessons to his next job designing airships, and he made the Hindenburg completely iceberg-proof!

CLIMAX is good, but SEXCLIMAX is even better.

I've been sneaking out at night and installing lamps on the underside of every photovoltaic panel I can find. Sure, there are upwards of 80% losses, but I prefer to think of them as nearly 20% gains.

Making out with yourself: now an official xkcd theme? Troubling.

The safe is empty except for an unsolved 5x5 Rubik's cube.

Extremely rude how Turing's later formulations of the halting problem called me out by name specifically.

They'd convince me to come out of retirement for one last job: biting into a giant lump of slightly soft wax a couple of times.

Younger people get very few joint replacements, yet they're also getting more than older people did at the same age. This means you can choose between 'Why are millennials getting so (many/few) joint replacements?' depending on which trend fits your current argument better.

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

Later, at home: 'Dear diary: Still can't figure out what to write here ...'

So do you have any plans for z=-0.000000000000045?

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

... tazer ... fire extinguisher ... bird feeder ... toilet paper ...

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.

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

The most delicious exotic fruit discovered this way is the strawberry banana. Sadly, it's only stable in puree form, so it's currently limited to yogurt and smoothies, but they're building a massive collider in Europe to search for a strawberry banana that can be eaten whole.

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

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

According to these blood tests, you're like 30% cereal.

’"‘”’" means "I edited this text on both my phone and my laptop before sending it"

The worst is being teased by responsible, mask-wearing teens. They even spritz the hamster ball with disinfectant before rolling it, carefully avoiding the filter vents.

For decades I've been working off the accumulated rotation from one long afternoon on a merry-go-round when I was eight.

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.

Household tip: Tired of buying so much toilet paper? Try unspooling the paper from the roll before using it. A single roll can last for multiple days that way, and it's much easier on your plumbing.

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

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

Uh-oh.

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

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.

Ok, well, we'll be sure to pay you sometime soon, geologically speaking.

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

Wishbone and the Illustrated Classics series have gotten me through every conversation I've ever had about Dickens, Treasure Island, The Anarchist's Cookbook, and Our Bodies, Ourselves.

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

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

I hate how the media only ever uses the first part of this quote, stripping it of its important context.

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

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

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

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

It's an amazing time of day; the light is great for photography.

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

Hey, man, the 1670s called. They were like 'Wherefore this demonic inſtrument? By what ſorcery does it produce ſuch ſounds?"

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

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

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

Not even metapneumovirus, easily the common cold virus with the coolest name, warrants our sympathy. Colds suck. No mercy.

Using a reflective wall in a game to give one shot two chances to hit is called a double-tapetum lucidum.

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

"Wait, so in this version is Frankenstein also the doctor's name?" "No, he's just 'The Doctor'."

There's also the TV show based on the hit Hot and Cold Music books: Fun With Chairs, Royal Rumble, Knife Blizzard, Breakfast for Birds, and Samba Serpents.

Just tell me everything you're thinking about in order from most important to last, and then we'll be friends and we can eat apples together.

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.

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

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

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

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

I'm waiting for the day when, if you tell someone 'I'm from the internet', instead of laughing they just ask 'oh, what part?'

Life hack: Wait for an advanced civilization to be briefly distracted, then sneak in and construct a slightly smaller Dyson sphere inside theirs.

You can also try 'Yikes.'

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

We haven't actually seen a star fall in since we invented telescopes, but I have a list of ones I'm really hoping are next.

'Oh, hey Mom. No, nothing important, just at work.'

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.

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

If you're interested in the subject, Lawrence Lessig's 'Free Culture' is pretty good

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

I hate when people take photos of their meal instead of eating it, because there's nothing I love more than the sound of other people chewing.

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

The next day: 'What? Six bank robberies!? But I just vandalized the library!' 'Nice try. They saw your plate with all the 1's and I's.' 'That's impossible! I've been with my car the whole ti-- ... wait. Ok, wow, that was clever of her.'

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

The value of n is still unknown, but new results constrain it to fall between 8 and 10^500, ruling out popular 'n=1' and 'n=2' theories.

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

The pile gets soaked with data and starts to get mushy over time, so it's technically recurrent.

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

'Here, I'll put my number in your cell pho -- wait, why is it already here?'

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

Some tires are marketed as 'all-shape tires,' but if driven in a climate with both inverted catenary falls and triangle falls, they wear out really fast.

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

'But what's the buzz about the film?' 'We're hoping it's distracting.'

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.

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

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

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

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

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

Interestingly, on a true vertical log plot, I think the Eiffel Tower's sides really would be straight lines.

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.

For some reason, my childhood suspension of disbelief had no problem with the fact that this ancient galaxy is full of humans, but was derailed by language. There's no Asia OR Europe there, so where'd they get all the Indo-European roots?

It's important for devices to have internet connectivity so the manufacturer can patch remote exploits.

When charged particles of more than 5 TeV pass through a bubble chamber, they leave a trail of candy.

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

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".

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

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

Congratulations to whoever wished for revenge on a forest near the Tunguska River, a 1980 Chevy Malibu in Peekskill NY, Alabama resident Ann Hodges, every building in Chelyabinsk with glass windows, and the non-avian dinosaurs.

Nearby, there were also no injuries when a multi-vortex tornado hit one of those spinning teacup rides.

The E's wedding invitation definitely used the word LOVE more times than was strictly necessary.

Wait, what?

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

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

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

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.

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

This is roughly equivalent to 'number of times I've picked up a seashell at the ocean' / 'number of times I've picked up a seashell', which in my case is pretty close to 1, and gets much closer if we're considering only times I didn't put it to my ear.

Contains 100% of your recommended daily allowance!

We can ask the Earl for his order once he's fully extruded from the dispenser.

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

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