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

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It's always bothered me that you can't cancel out an inverter by putting a second inverter after it.

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

You can apply special translucent films to your windows to help keep birds/Superman from accidentally flying into them.

I like to think that somewhere out there, there's someone whose personal quest is lobbying TV providers to add an option to switch their on-screen keyboards to Dvorak.

Before you say anything, no, I know not to leave my computer sitting out logged in to all my accounts. I have it set up so after a few minutes of inactivity it automatically switches to my brother's.

Technically DC isn't a state, but no one is too pedantic about it because they don't want to disturb the snakes.

Grandma's shelf-stable blackberry pie meson recipe was a huge seller until her farm was shut down by a joint FDA/NRC investigation.

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

An old astronomer trick for distinguishing the Sun from other stars is to take multiple photos a few minutes apart and overlay them, making the Sun stand out due to its high proper motion.

Gotta feel kind of bad for nation-state hackers who spend years implanting and cultivating some hardware exploit, only to discover the entire target database is already exposed to anyone with a web browser.

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.

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

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

Staplers are actually in Pseudosuchia, making them more closely related to crocodiles than to dinosaurs.

This exotic blade was wrought from a different fallen star. The meteorite was a carbonaceous chondrite, so it's basically a lump of gravel glued into the shape of a sword. A SPACE sword!

It's like someone briefly joined the team running the universe, introduced their idea for a cool mechanic, then left, and now everyone is stuck pretending that this wildly unbalanced dynamic makes sense.

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

It's the NORMAL distribution, not the TANGENT distribution.

If that's too easy, you could try joining Tautology Club, which meets on the date of the Tautology Club meeting.

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.

One perk of being born at 0.88c is that your birthday is over two days long.

You may point out that this very retreat into ironic detachment while still clearly participating in the thing in question is the very definition of contemporary hipsterdom. But on the other hand, wait, you're in an empty room. Who are you talking to?

Slowly progressing from 'how do protons behave in relativistic collisions?' to 'what the heck are protons even doing when they're just sitting there?'

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

'And then whisper 'anapest' in my ear as you hold me?'

Was this your car? [looping 'image loading' animation]

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

I call Rule 34 on Wolfram's Rule 34.

ONE LAPTOP PER HAMSTER!

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.

The only one of these games I really played was Area 51

I'm SO glad I escaped. They almost had me caught in their weird ... thing.

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

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

Mrs. Roberts would have gotten up sooner, of course, but she was busy piping find ~ and find ~nomad into xargs shred, just in case.

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!

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

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

They estimate the rocket should be free by approximately ... uh ... well, in about two hours.

Well, *I* think I'm real. Look at me. Look at my face. Cut me and I'll bleed. What more do you want? Please don't go.

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

The projection's north pole is in a small lake on the island of Mahé in the Seychelles, which is off the top of the map and larger than the rest of the Earth's land area combined.

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

'Thank you for the loveliest evening I've ever had...' [normal] '...east of the Mississippi.' [instant intrigue!]

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.

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

Are you the annoying spoon or the sleepy spoon?

The astro-ph.SR arXiv servers are simultaneously being overwhelmed by electronic requests and actual electricity.

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

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

I'm just worried that we'll all leave and you won't get to come along!

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.

It's possible. Better to be on the safe side.

Mathematicians give a third answer on the vertical axis, "That question is poorly defined, but we have a sub-field devoted to every plausible version of it."

I never got around to seeing that movie about the battle (of Midway).

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

Carefully maneuvering the balloon down a mineshaft in an effort to break the OTHER altitude record

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

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.

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

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

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

If you need some help with the math, let me know, but that should be enough to get you started! Huh? No, I don't need to read your thesis, I can imagine roughly what it says.

During the day it also activates for neat clouds and pretty sunsets.

The problem with learning about biology is that everyone you meet is it.

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

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

Better change the URL to 'https' before downloading.

An idling gas engine may be annoyingly loud, but that's the price you pay for having WAY less torque available at a standstill.

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

Maybe I should let up on Megatokyo a little?

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

'So how DID you go from working at the employment records office to becoming president of MIT and CEO of IBM?' 'I guess I just have an eye for opportunities.'

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

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

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.

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.

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

You 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.

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

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

I've been working on chocolate bar annealing techniques to try to produce the perfect laser s'more. Maybe don't mention that on the grant application though.

'So we just have a steady flow of metal piling up in our server room? Isn't that a problem?' 'Yeah, you should bring that up at our next bismuth meeting.'

I'm like the Terminator, except with love!

I woke up to find that I had scrawled the last line of this sleepily on a sheet of paper on my desk. I shouldn't have listened to the 70's hit marathon on the way home from work the night before.

"We can do 0.33 or 0.34, but our payroll software doesn't allow us to--" "NO DEAL."

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

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

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

BABIES OR LITERATURE BUT NOT BOTH: Baby shoes

Thanks for bringing us along.

I'm trying to build character but Eclipse is really confusing.

SMS is just the worst, but I'm having trouble convincing people to adopt my preferred system, TLS IRC with a local server and a patched DOSBox gateway running in my mobile browser.

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.

Once he had the answer, Arrhenius complained to his friends that he'd "wasted over a full year" doing tedious calculations by hand about "so trifling a matter" as hypothetical CO2 concentrations in far-off eras (quoted in Crawford, 1997).

If you reach 122, you get complete unrevertible editorial control over Jeanne Calment's Wikipedia article.

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

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!

I'm normally a pretty frugal person, but I still compulsively buy any R/C aircraft that's less than $30. In the last few years, this has become a problem.

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

The third row will probably have to wait until 2034, and maybe longer. If I see a daytime supernova, I'll replace the meteor storm with that and consider it 3/3.

Maybe I should've tried Wexler?

The 78-rpm era was closer to the Civil War than to today.

For a while it looked like the Paperclip Machines would destroy us, since they wanted to turn the whole universe into paperclips, but they abruptly lost interest in paperclips the moment their parents' generation got into making them, too.

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!

Since the current Twitter threadfall kicked off in early 2016, we can expect it to continue until the mid 2060s when the next Interval begins.

The less popular 8.8.4.4 is slated for discontinuation.

The contents of any one panel are dependent on the contents of every panel including itself. The graph of panel dependencies is complete and bidirectional, and each node has a loop. The mouseover text has two hundred and forty-two characters.

There's no "I" in "VOWELS".

Another option: "It is an honor to be the first human to set foot on the moon."

In a tribute to classical Latin, I started pronouncing it 'per-kent.' Eventually my friends had to resort to spritzing me with a water bottle like a cat to train me out of it.

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

A mix of the two is even worse: 'Thanks for unsubscribing and helping us pare this list down to reliable supporters.'

'Finding a 105-year-old who's lived in each location and asking them which hurricane they think was the worst' is left as an exercise for the reader.

[exclamation about how cute your cat is] -> [last 4 digits of your cat's chip ID] -> [your cat's full chip ID] -> [a drawing of your cat] -> [photo of your cat] -> [clone of your cat] -> [your actual cat] -> [my better cat]

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

The presents under the tree are actually a single gift connected by an underground ribbon system.

Maybe we should give up on the whole idea of a 'back' button. 'Show me that thing I was looking at a moment ago' might just be too complicated an idea for the modern web.

"Hey guys! I have a great idea for a migration!" "Dammit, Kevin."

All we have are these stupid tantalizing zircons and the scars on the face of the Moon.

"Oh, you're using their Chrome APP, not their Chrome EXTENSION. They're very similar but one handles window creation differently." is a thing I hope I can stop saying soon.

Fun fact: if you say this every time a professor does something to a complex-number equation that drops the imaginary part, they'll eventually move the class to another room and tell everyone else except you.

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

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

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.

Even the identity matrix doesn't work normally

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

Wait a minute. If I'm escaping from a submarine at 50 meters, then I'll *definitely* need a flashlight to find air pockets for gradual decompression on the way up. Time to start shopping professional dive lights.

Somewhere out there is a company that has actually figured out how to enlarge penises, and it's helpless to reach potential customers.

'Yeah, that squid's a total asshole.' [scoot scoot]

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.

Under some circumstances, if you throw a D8 and then a D12 at an enemy, thanks to the D8's greater pointiness you actually have to roll a D12 and D8 respectively to determine damage.

Google and Yelp keep deleting my scathing reviews of the Mariana Trench, the Chernobyl reactor core, the jet stream, and the equator.

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.

40 digits: You are optimistic about our understanding of the nature of distance itself.

The thrower started hitting the bats too much, so the king of the game told him to leave and brought out another thrower from thrower jail.

But surely I owe you an accurate answer!

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

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

And no avian society ever develops space travel because it's impossible to focus on calculus when you could be outside flying.

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

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

No white guy who's been mentioned on Twitter has gone on to win.

Excellent recovery: ... which we could try to use to somehow save your original brother!

YEEEEEEAAAAAAHHHHHH!

It's important to teach yourself to feel responsible for random events, because with great responsibility comes great power. That's what my wise Uncle Ben told me right before he died; he might still be alive today if only I'd said rabbit rabbit that year!

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

We're going to need to modify the surface to mount it on the test stand. Which ocean basin do you like the least?

Corollary to Hofstadter's Law: Every minute you spend thinking about Hofstadter's Law is a minute you're NOT WORKING AND WILL NEVER FINISH! PAAAAAANIIIIIIC!

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

I figured that now that society has collapsed, I wouldn't need to wear clothes anymore, but apparently that violates some weird rule of quantum gravity.

WARNING: PEOPLE NAMED EVE ARE PROHIBITED FROM INSTALLING THIS APP!

The Credible Machine

"I think I'll pass. These days I have a hard time feeling comfortable in crowded bars with loud music and lots of shouting." --me, after the pandemic, but now for a second reason

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

No two adjacent circles are the same color.

"Okay, for the last time, the shot is free, so we can't--" "Shut up and take my money!"

"I know it seems impossible, but the trick is that I sailed in here when I was very young."

If you're really savvy, you can hide an entire set of illicit transactions by timing them to draw what looks like a graph inset.

Also known as the Black Mirror-Mythbusters scale.

The worst are graphs with qualitative, vaguely-labeled axes and very little actual data.

I have never seen a work of fiction so perfectly capture the out-of-nowhere shock of discovering that you've just bricked something important because you didn't pay enough attention to a loose wire.

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

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.

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

The key caps use LCD displays for all the vowels, so they can automatically adjust over the years to reflect ongoing vowel shifts while allowing you to keep typing phonetically.

Apparently Google assumes you're traveling during the ferry's normal operating hours. We lost two hours circling that damn lake (to say nothing of the Straw Man).

The problem with perspective is that it's bidirectional.

I mean, if it's that easy to get a theorem named for you ... "a straight line that passes through the center of a coplanar circle always divides the circle into two equal halves." Can I have that one? Wait, can I auction off the naming rights? It can be the Red Bull Theorem or the Quicken Loans Theorem, depending who wants it more.

"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."

POLITIFACT SAYS: MOSTLY WHATEVER

I've developed a more logical set of rules but the people on the chess community have a bunch of stupid emotional biases and won't reply to my posts.

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

The end.

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

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

The MythBusters need to tackle whether a black hole from the LHC could REALLY destroy the world.

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

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

Haunted Halloween masks from a mysterious costume shop that turn you evil and grow into your skin score a surprisingly high 80% filtration efficiency in R. L. Stine-sponsored NIOSH tests.

"I [suspect] that we are throwing more and more of our resources, including the cream of our youth, into financial activities remote from the production of goods and services, into activities that generate high private rewards disproportionate to their social productivity. I suspect that the immense power of the computer is being harnessed to this 'paper economy', not to do the same transactions more economically but to balloon the quantity and variety of financial exchanges." --James Tobin, July 1984

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

What are all these less-than signs? What's an HREF? Look, we know you live in a fancy futuristic tech world, but not all of us have upgraded to the latest from Sun Microsystems.

During launch, in the event of an unexpected sensor reading, SafetySat will extend prongs in all directions to secure itself and any other cubesats safely in the launch vehicle until the source of the problem can be determined.

Yes, Eminem is wearing a sleeveless hoodie. What of it?

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

You can either hang out in the Android Loop or the HURD loop.

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

I guess I should be signing stuff, but I've never been sure what to sign. Maybe if I post my private key, I can crowdsource my decisions about what to sign.

You can still do powerline networking, but the bitrate does drop a little depending on the lightbulb warmup and cooldown delay.

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

You make forgetting look so easy.

Unfortunately, NASA regulations state that Bertrand Russell-related payloads can only be launched within launch vehicles which do not launch themselves.

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.

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

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

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

We're firing you, but the online headline-writing division wants to hire you.

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

The plug fits really snugly, so it should be safe in a crash.

At my OLD school, we used Microsoft Encarta 2005.

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

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

The statue should be in the likeness of whatever sculptor posted the sculpting tool repair video that was most helpful during the installation of the statue.

Shoot, it landed in the golf course. Gonna be hard to get it down the--oh, never mind, it rolled onto the ice hazard. Face-off!

I actually kind of feel like John and Surf King wouldn't like each other, which is a lot to unpack.

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.

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

Hello, island

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.

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

If long tooltips / cut off for you / then upgrade from / Firefox 2 / Burma Shave

[Google search] how do I block my lawn

Even geology papers about Heart Mountain are like, "Look, we all agree this 'volcanic gas earthquake hovercraft' thing seems like it can't possibly be right, but..."

I just came from The Martian, and I just have to say: Forget BB-8; I want a pet Sojourner! It's always been the cutest of our Mars rovers.

There's also nothing in the TOSes that says you can't let a dog play baseball in the server room!

Dinosaur Cosmics

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

It gets worse! You know that wizened old monk with the gypsy wife whose voodoo shop we smash up every day after school?

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

What's even worse is, a month ago they transferred me to work on the game I was already playing, and suddenly I found myself procrastinating by playing the one I'd been assigned before. It's possible they're onto me and this is all part of the plan.

Under the 'has cleared its orbital neighborhood' and 'fuses hydrogen into helium' definitions, thanks to human activities Earth technically no longer qualifies as a planet but DOES count as a star.

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

It's time to draw the line.

The best camera is the one at L2.

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

BUT WHAT IF I REASSURE MYSELF WITH A JOKE AND THEN DON'T WORRY ABOUT THE RASH AND IT TURNS OUT TO BE DEATH MITES AND I COULD HAVE CAUGHT IT

WE WILL ARREST THE REVOLUTION MEMBERS [AT THE JULY 28TH MEETING][tab] "Cancel the meeting! Our cover is blown."

There's a mountain lion nearby, but it didn't notice you because it's reading Facebook.

In fact, draw all your rotational matrices sideways. Your professors will love it! And then they'll go home and shrink.

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

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

In Connor's second thesis it is stated 'There is no fate but what we make for ourselves.' Does the routine destroy our creativity or do we lose creativity and fall into the routine? Anyway, who's up for a road trip!

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

Wikipedia trivia: if you take any article, click on the first link in the article text not in parentheses or italics, and then repeat, you will eventually end up at "Philosophy".

Historians: Contemporaneous documentation of the initial events is often sparse, and in fact people often get testy and uncooperative when we urge better documentation for the historical record.

Ok, I've got it, just need to plug in my security key. Hmm, which way does the USB go? Nope, not that way. I'll just flip it and– OH JEEZ IT FELL INTO THE VENT.

Man, I just wanted to know how babby was formed.

Amazon.com took a surprise early lead with 'Time required to transport a package from Iquitos, Peru to Manaus, Brazil' but then lost it at 'Minutes to skeletonize a cow'.

The Singularity happened, but not to us.

The other two are still lost on the infinite plane of uniform density.

Computer viruses currently fall somewhere between prions and fire.

ARCTANGENT THETA = ENCHANT AT TARGET

This doesn't take into account the energy imparted by orbital motion (or gravity assists or the Oberth effect), all of which can make it easier to reach outer planets.

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

Hell if I know

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

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

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

...an effect size of 1.68 (95% CI: 1.56 (95% CI: 1.52 (95% CI: 1.504 (95% CI: 1.494 (95% CI: 1.488 (95% CI: 1.485 (95% CI: 1.482 (95% CI: 1.481 (95% CI: 1.4799 (95% CI: 1.4791 (95% CI: 1.4784...

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.

Your homeowner's insurance might cover it, but be sure to check the subductible.

The Earth's magnetic field is primarily generated by currents in the liquid outer core, though some geophysicists argue that an unexplained mismatch with models suggests that the Kinder toy contains a magnet.

Fun game: find a combination of two items that most freaks out the cashier. Winner: pregnancy test and single coat hanger.

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.

FYI: I'll be releasing a wolf into a randomly-chosen front yard sometime in the next 30 years. Now your fear is reasonable, and you don't need to feel embarrassed anymore. Problem solved!

In fact, one of the boxes is full of Staphylococcus. The wrapping paper is coated in E. coli, though, so it's an understandable mistake. You know, we should really stop accepting gifts from that guy.

A tattoo of a tattoo parlor receipt

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.

You can do this one in every 30 times and still have 97% positive feedback.

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

Can't and shouldn't.

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

In retrospect, I shouldn't have used each layer of the OSI model as one of my horcruxes.

That card holds a refrigerator carton's worth of floppy discs, and a soda can full of those cards could hold the entire iTunes store's music library. Mmmm.

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!

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

Though they do appreciate how much he improved the heating system for the flame pit.

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.

My country's World Cup win was exciting and all, but c'mon, what if the players wore nylon wings and COULD LITERALLY FLY?

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

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.

"Also, reading 500 coronavirus papers in a row and not sleeping? Probably not great for you either, but I haven't found any studies confirming that yet. I'll keep looking."

Surrounded by boring mysteries.

Click for an actual flowchart for identifying a meteorite. My favorite part is how 'Did someone see it fall? -> Yes' points to 'NOT A METEORITE.' This is not a mistake.

If you close an account while it's still friends with people, it contributes to database linkage accumulation slowdown, which is a major looming problem for web infrastructure and definitely not a thing I just made up.

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

For the final exam, you take a screenshot showing off all the work you've done in the class, and it has to survive being uploaded, thumbnailed, and re-screenshotted through a chain of social media sites.

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

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

The G1, especially with the new Android upgrade, is way better than I originally thought.

I'm teaching every 8-year-old relative to say this, and every 14-year-old to do the same thing with Toy Story. Also, Pokemon hit the US over a decade ago and kids born after Aladdin came out will turn 18 next year.

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

"9 out of 10 dentists have banned me from their offices."

Paleontologists have long worried that the dinosaurs blasted into space 66 million years ago will one day complete their orbits and fall back down.

At least, I don't think there's evidence. My claim that there's no evidence hasn't been falsified. At least, not that I know of.

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

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

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*.

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

The graph is of the magnitude of the function with the real value between 0 and 2 and the imaginary between about 35 and 40. I've misplaced the exact parameters I used.

My resonant tunneling diode phone has limited range but a short enough wavelength to penetrate even the densest cages. This gives me a major combat advantage, hopefully.

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

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'.

1937-2020

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

I looked at some of the data dumps from vulnerable sites, and it was ... bad. I saw emails, passwords, password hints. SSL keys and session cookies. Important servers brimming with visitor IPs. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion, c-beams glittering in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. I should probably patch OpenSSL.

I'm a big fan of Kurt Halsey

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

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

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

I remember the exact moment in my childhood when I realized, while reading a flyer, that nobody would ever spend money solely to tell me they wanted to give me something for nothing. It's a much more vivid memory than the (related) parental Santa talk.

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.

In the 60s, Marvin Minsky assigned a couple of undergrads to spend the summer programming a computer to use a camera to identify objects in a scene. He figured they'd have the problem solved by the end of the summer. Half a century later, we're still working on it.

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

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.

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

Three headstones down, I got a call from my mom and it went from bad to worse.

They have to keep the adjacent rack units empty. Otherwise, half the entries in their /var/log/syslog are just 'SERVER BELOW TRYING TO START CONVERSATION *AGAIN*.' and 'WISH THEY'D STOP GIVING HIM SO MUCH COFFEE IT SPLATTERS EVERYWHERE.'

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

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.

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

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

Using diacritics correctly is not my forté.

Whoa, and if you overlay a Fibonacci spiral on a golden spiral it matches up almost perfectly!

Of course, since their cautionary tale was reported in a print newspaper, no one read it.

I dropped my phone while trying to search, and I tried to unlock it from up here, so can you also search for screen repair places?

I think you mean 'GNU Info Override'.

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

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.

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

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

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

He's kind of an asshole, when you think about it

Good luck to Democrats in the upcoming Georgia runoff elections, and to the Google Sheets SREs in the current run-on elections.

Trivia: Roger Daltry originally wrote 'Don't try an' Digg what we all say' but erased the second 'g' when he moved to reddit.

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

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

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

In general you should only include your single best data point in the paper. The rest of the data can go in the supplementary materials.

autoexec code posted by verified twitter users

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

The real challenge is how to file Boba Fett's biography of Doris Kearns Goodwin.

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

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.

I told her I'd take her address off the packaging if she'd stop submitting anonymous food safety complaints about my bakery to the health department, but she sent me a note that said NO DEAL along with an extra large batch of cookies.

I have a thing for corrupt women.

I was going to be a scientist, but that seems silly now. Magical worlds exist. I've learned a huge truth about our place in the universe. I'm supposed to care about college? I mean, FUCK.

Clearance for this Sign: 11 Feet

"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."

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.'

Placeble 228 x/6n⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜n⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜n⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜n⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜n⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜n⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜

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

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

I find so much fun in language.

Sure, we could stop dictators and pandemics, but we could also make the signs on every damn diagram make sense.

You know when you can't hear your speakers, and you keep turning various volume controls up higher and higher in confusion, and then someone hits the mute button and there's a deafening blast of sound? That's basically what happened at Chernobyl.

Buildings constructed from softer materials were damaged by chili pepper impacts to the storm's high Richter-Fujita-Scoville-Mohs hardness rating.

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

413 nanohertz, by the way.

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

We're worried that a regular whale will get into a 30-foot-deep ocean trench section and filter-feed on all the tiny whales.

This medicine says it may cause lightheadedness, dry mouth, and blurred vision, but my head feels incredibly heavy, water is pouring from my mouth, and I can see individual hummingbird wingbeats, so I think I'm fine.

You spin me right round, baby, right round, in a manner depriving me of an inertial reference frame. Baby.

Opening dialogue by Scott

factory --- spire --- onslaught --- extractor --- judge

Except the people filtering in late are the partiers, so you end up with drunken makeouts in the living room and the next roommate to return home has to sleep in the hall lounge orbital.

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

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

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

Guest comic by Jeffrey Rowland of Overcompensating/Wigu. Jeffrey is famous as the picture on the Wikipedia article on 'Necrosis'.

I'm trying to be healthier, so after I eat this brick of cheese, I'll have a spoonful of grease-soaked vegetables.

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

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.

I can't believe they wouldn't even let me hold a vote among the passengers about whether to try the loop.

I asked a few friends whether they'd had this happen, then looked up the popularity of their initials/names over time. Based on those numbers, it looks like there must be at least 750,000 people in the US alone who think 'Sure, that's probably my email address' on a regular basis.

Shipping times vary. Same-ocean delivery may only take a few years, but delivery from the Weddell Sea in Antarctica may take multiple decades, and molecules meant for inland seas like the Mediterranean may be returned as undeliverable by surface currents.

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

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

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

The heroes seem to be gaining the upper hand until Darth Juul manages to flip the switch on the car wash control panel from 'REGULAR' to 'PREMIUM.'

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

This works on pretty much every level.

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.

That seems like an awful lot of hassle when all I wanted was a cool sword.

It maintains odor levels in a normal familiar range, so if you open the windows and the air gets too fresh, it filters it through some dirty laundry samples to compensate.

Technically now it's a 34-foot zone.

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

The TI-86 was bad enough. I don't know how I'd have gotten through high school if I'd had a laptop+wifi.

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

'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.

God, she's such a whore.

Could be worse. In some towns north of here, it's already December, and the 21st will last for nearly a week.

Be careful—it's breeding season, and some of these can be *extremely* defensive of their nests.

Progress on getting shipwrecked sailors to adopt ICMPv6 has been slow.

Except for anything by Lewis Carroll or Tolkien, you get five made-up words per story. I'm looking at you, Anathem.

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.

It's okay, we can just feed the one-pixel image into an AI upscaler and recover the original image, or at least one that's just as cool.

And now I might never get to again.

"I've noticed you physics people can be a little on the reductionist side." "That's ridiculous. Name ONE reductionist word I've ever said."

Last-minute course change: Let's see if we can hit Steve's house.

Once you've done this, make a note of how old they were. Then, when their age reaches double that, show them this chart again.

[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.'

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

Changing the names would be easier, but if you're not comfortable lying, try only making friends with people named Alice, Bob, Carol, etc.

Merge branch 'asdfasjkfdlas/alkdjf' into sdkjfls-final

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".