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

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"röntgen" and "rem" are 20th-century physics terms that mean "no trespassing."

That's actually the original Japanese version of A Million Random Digits, which is much better than the American remake the book was based on.

Functional programming combines the flexibility and power of abstract mathematics with the intuitive clarity of abstract mathematics.

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.

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

Too good not to happen.

It's bad enough that all the families in your Sims are just you and Maggie recreated over and over.

"But there are seven billion people in the world! I can't possibly stop to consider how ALL of them might interpret something!" "Ah, yes, there's no middle ground between 'taking personal responsibility for the thoughts and feelings of every single person on Earth' and 'covering your eyes and ears and yelling logically correct statements into the void.' That's a very insightful point and not at all inane."

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

I looked up "insanity" in like 10 different dictionaries and none of them said anything like that. Neither did the DSM-4. But I'll keep looking. Maybe it's in the DSM-5!

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

The arbiter gave my knight a red card for capturing with cleats up :(

It's like one teraspoon / when all you need is a kilonife

Checking whether build environment is sane ... build environment is grinning and holding a spatula. Guess not.

My normal approach is useless here, too.

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

Oh, what a pity, can't you understand . . .

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

FYI: The 'drop, cover, and hold on' advice only applies to earthquakes. If you encounter a mountain lion, you should absolutely not drop to the ground, crawl under it, and hold on to one of its legs.

All music is just performances of 4'33" in studios where another band happened to be playing at the time.

But Einstein said it was the most powerful force in the universe, and I take all my investment advice from flippant remarks by theoretical physicists making small talk at parties.

Hey, what are the odds -- five Ayn Rand fans on the same train! Must be going to a convention.

Best trivia I learned while working on this: 'Man, Farmville is so huge! Do you realize it's the second-biggest browser-based social-networking-centered farming game in the WORLD?' Then you wait for the listener to do a double-take.

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

How could anyone consider themselves a well-rounded adult without a basic understanding of silicate geochemistry? Silicates are everywhere! It's hard to throw a rock without throwing one!

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

They all made fun of Autometalogolex, but someday there will be a problem with Christmas that can only be solved if Santa somehow gets a serious headache, and then they'll see.

That helmet won't save him.

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

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

You can leave at any time through the door over there. It's a Louisville door, so you'll need to find a compatible knob. No, don't be silly, that one is a Lexington knob! Of course it won't fit.

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

90% of the iceberg is hidden beneath the water, but that 90% only uses 10% of its brain, so it's really only 9%.

Mars does get a good score on 'noise levels' and 'scenic views,' but the school district ranking isn't great; the only teacher--the Perseverance rover--is too busy with rock samples to teach more than the occasional weekend class.

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

In the Hall of the Mountain King was accidentally composed on log/log paper.

And then it turns out they're both Tyler Durden.

No one likes my novelty ringtone, an audio recording of a phone on vibrate sitting on a hard surface.

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

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

"The name wasn't a tip-off?" "Honestly, at first I thought you were saying 'Juneau'. A gravity assist seemed like a weird way to get to Alaska, but I figured it must be more efficient or something."

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

It's probably just me. If driving were as dangerous as it seems, hundreds of people would be dying every day!

[Halfway to the Sun ...] Heyyyy ... what if this BALLOON is full of acorns?!

I'm as surprised as you! I didn't think it was possible.

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

Hard to imagine political rhetoric more microtargeted at me than 'I love Venn diagrams. I really do, I love Venn diagrams. It's just something about those three circles.'

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

It started as a mistake that everyone was afraid to admit to, and then it stuck because removing it 'looks silly.'.

Our flight gathered valuable data on whether a commercial airliner in the eye of a hurricane can do a loop.

Oh, I think this word might mean 'Crisco'!

Hey, when you're done draining the syrup, just leave the hole, okay?

You'd think the most expensive part would be the quark-gluon plasma chamber, but it's actually usually the tube to the top of the atmosphere to carry the cosmic rays down.

Superman lies near the bird/plane boundary over a range of distances, which explains the confusion.

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."

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

Sometimes I try to picture what everything would look like if the whole spectrum were compressed into the visible spectrum. Also sometimes I try to picture your sister naked.

We have email and social media now, so we probably don't need to keep exchanging business cards by pressing them gently against each others' faces with an open palm and smearing them around.

If we get the doors open and plug up the dam on the Sirannon so the water rises a little, the pool will start draining into Moria. How do you think the Watcher would fare against a drenched Balrog?

Why did the chicken cross the road? It begins over five thousand years ago with the domestication of the red junglefowl in southeast Asia and the development of paved roads in the Sumerian city of Ur.

All our teams make an effort to stay optimistic, but I will say that once our virus division saw the vaccine efficacy data, they started asking for payment up front.

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

Actually, I think if all higher math professors had to write for the Simple English Wikipedia for a year, we'd be in much better shape academically.

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

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

It does come at the small cost of a LOT more off-by-40-or-50 errors.

This really is a true story, and she doesn't know I put it in my comic because her wifi hasn't worked for weeks.

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

The Mercator projection drastically distorts the size of almost every area of land except a small ring around the North and South Poles.

In the final vote, the doubters were won over by the strength of the name IMMUNION.

In a way, all vultures are Time Vultures; some just have more patience than others.

I have this weird thing where if I don't drink enough water, I start feeling bad and then die of dehydration.

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

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.

Hurricane forums are full of excited comments about central pressure and wind speed and comparisons to Camille and 1931 and 1938, with hastily-tacked-on notes about how it will be tragic if anyone dies and they hope it's a dud.

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

Science should be exactly as cool as the headlines sound. Like the 'RUSSIANS CUT APART AND REASSEMBLE DOGS' thing.

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

If a materials scientist gives you a present, always ask whether regifting will incur any requirements for Federal paperwork.

Hey, I don't make the rules. It's in the book.

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.

And then a second one, to drain the sea.

BREAKING: Senator's bold pro-podium stand leads to primary challenge from prescriptivist base.

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

With a space elevator, a backyard full of solar panels could launch about 500 horses per year, and a large power plant could launch 10 horses per minute.

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.

To motivate it to fire its harpoons hard enough, Rosetta's Philae lander has been programmed to believe it is trying to kill the comet.

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.

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

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

My parents sent me to several years of intensive Kix test prep.

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

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

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

Medium: Pencil on paper

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).

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

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

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

There are regularly placed bumps on the underside just the right size to press the rocker switch on the power strip.

[audience looks around] 'What just happened?' 'There must be some context we're missing.'

The henchmen Bebop and Rocksteady have hijacked the musical genres for us just like the Lone Ranger hijacked the William Tell Overture for our parents.

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

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

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

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 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."

"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."

I just want to stay up long enough to watch the ball drop into the hole number 2018.

'It's not actually ... it's a DEVICE for EXPLORING a PLAUSIBLE REALITY that's not the one we're in, to gain a broader understanding about it.' 'oh, like a boat!' '...' 'Just for the sake of argument, we should get a boat! You can invite the Devil, too, if you want.'

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

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

Dad, where is Grandpa right now?

I'm always disappointed when 'Anamorphic Widescreen' doesn't refer to a widescreen Animorphs movie.

Could be worse. The last guy in that situation fell for one of the transient trumpeting angels.

Biologically speaking, what we call a 'snake' is actually a human digestive tract which has escaped from its host.

I tried converting the prices into pizzas, to put it in more familiar terms, and it just became a hard-to-think-about number of pizzas.

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

And a different ghost has replaced me in the bedroom.

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.

The experimental math department's budget is under scrutiny for how much they've been spending on trains leaving Chicago at 9:00pm traveling at 45 mph.

A long time in the future, in a galaxy far, far, away, astronomers in the year 2008 sight an unusual gamma-ray burst originating from somewhere far across the universe.

Unfortunately, KM3NeT led to the discovery of the Pauli anglerfish, which emits Cherenkov radiation to prey on neutrino researchers.

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

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?'

"Sorry, doctor, I'm going to have to come in on a different day--I have another appointment that would be really hard to move, in terms of the kinetic energy requirements."

By clicking anywhere, scrolling, or closing this notification, you agree to be legally bound by the witch Sycorax within a cloven pine.

I read in this one article that the breaking of electroweak symmetry is the reason we have SOULS. This guy with a degree said so!

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

In addition to having all their budgets in a spreadsheet with consistent formatting, they just love expressing preferences on a well-calibrated numerical scale.

In Universe Pro®™ the laws of physics remain unchanged under time reversal, to maintain backward compatibility.

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.

Some people suspect that it started as a "No, I didn't forget Valentine's Day" excuse that got out of hand.

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

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

Normally, the Shuttle can't quite safely reach the orbital inclination required to pass over both those points from a Canaveral launch, but this is an alternate history in which either it launches from Vandenberg or everyone hates the Outer Banks.

Damn. Not only did he not install it, he sutured a 'Vista-Ready' sticker onto my arm.

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.

"The parasitism might be mediated by a fungus!" exclaimed the biologist who was trying to ruin Christmas again.

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

They're up there with coral islands, lightning, and caterpillars turning into butterflies.

[five years later] Ok, it seems we were accidentally zoomed in slightly too far. But imagine there's a cool-looking twisted accretion disc just outside this black square!

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

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

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

In the off-seasons, I hire an animal trainer to help confront secret agents with situations which they are unable to report by radio.

The less popular 8.8.4.4 is slated for discontinuation.

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

'This HAZMAT container contains radioactive material with activity of one becquerel.' 'So, like, a single banana slice?'

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

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.

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.

Some personal news: After treating my first case a few years ago with antibiotics, I can report that I have now had appendicitis for the second and--unless something extremely unexpected happened with the surgery--final time.

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

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

Just yesterday I bought my first non-DRM'd songs (The Last Vegas, in keeping with my 'I only listen to things from Guitar Hero' theme).

The Antikythera mechanism had a whole set of gears specifically to track the cyclic popularity of skinny jeans and low-rise waists.

They just want researchers in the enclosure to feel enriched and stimulated. ('The Enclosure' is what archivists call the shadowy world outside their archives in which so many people are trapped.)

If you walk out that door you'll be crossing the Rubicon with me, and that's one stream I'm not ready to cross.

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

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

There's nothing hotter than porn dubbed over with a poorly-mic'd teenager's voice explaining each step in a droning monotone. 'okay, we're almost at the spawn point ... separate the labia, but watch out, there are more inside them ..."

To whoever typed 'why is arwen dying': GOOD. FUCKING. QUESTION.

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.

Try our bottomless drinks and fall forever!

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

All services are microservices if you ignore most of their features.

'Whoa, twenty-two in two hours!' 'Your site got twenty-two hundred hits in two hours?' 'No. Twenty-two. But still, that's like half the people on the internet!'

It's like you tried to define a formal grammar based on fragments of a raw database dump from the QuickBooks file of a company that's about to collapse in an accounting scandal.

Freestyle rapping is basically applied Markov chains.

With reasonable assumptions about latitude and body shape, how much time might she gain them? Note: whatever the answer, sunrise always comes too soon. (Also, is it worth it if she throws up?)

Poor Weeoming.

"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.

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

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

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

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).

Sometimes when I steer shopping carts around corners, I slide them a little and pretend I'm getting the blue spark boost.

Hell if I know

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!

They say if a mathematician doesn't do their great work by age eleven, they never will.

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

For obvious reasons, the prize is awarded at a different time of year from the others, while it's still fresh in the committee's memory.

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

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

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.

Ugh, it's stuck to my laptop. It must have bound to the ACER-2 receptor.

If you're annoying enough, you can get them to respond with an involuntary second sigh and get a rhythm going.

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

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

I spent more time trying to get an audible.com audio book playing than it took to listen to the book. I have lost every other piece of DRM-locked music I have paid for.

Sometimes, you can tell Bloom filters are the wrong tool for the job, but when they're the right one you can never be sure.

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

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

Are you ok? Do you need help?

The ball's density also varies, but players don't learn the value until after choosing their raquets. The infamous 'bowling ball table tennis' region of the parameter space often leads to equipment damage.

Massage: Theoretical (10), Quantum (6), High-energy (2), Computational (1), Marine (1), Astro- (None)

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

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

I occasionally do this with mile markers on the highway.

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

'We can also use middle names in place of first pet's names, but yours is something incomprehensible about dropping tables.'

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

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

No, we actually do have a woman who's basically part of our fellowship. She lives in Rivendell, you wouldn't know her.

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.

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.'

It's my most ambitious project yet, judging by the amount of guacamole.

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?'.

Ma'am, I admit that wasn't in the best taste, but you have to admire my delivery! Ha ha, get it? Oh God, don't throw those syringes! Your baby's fine!

To be fair, my job at NASA was working on robots and didn't actually involve any orbital mechanics. The small positive slope over that period is because it turns out that if you hang around at NASA, you get in a lot of conversations about space.

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

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

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

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".

Adding data for South Korea but with their cases scaled to match the population of Japan and the land area of Australia, and vice versa.

So, um. Do you want to get a drink after the game?

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

Increasing-precision timestamps are the Jaws theme of incident reports.

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

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

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

An apple fell on Isaac Newton's head and gave him the idea that the moon might be a tasty apple, though this turned out not to be true--the Apollo program eventually determined that it was just a desolate and bland Red Delicious.

The two best reasons to get into fossils are booping trilobites and getting to say the word "fossiliferous" a lot.

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.

During the second semester, the path is briefly routed through the dishwasher.

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

Our lawyers were worried because it turns out the company inherits its debt from the parent universe, but luckily cosmic inflation reduced it to nearly zero.

Type II Kardashev civilizations eventually completely enclose their planetary system in a Dyson sphere because space is way too big to look at all the time.

They also showed activation in the parts of the brain associated with exposure to dubious study methodology, concern about unremoved piercings, and exasperation with fMRI techs who won't stop talking about Warped Tour.

I firmly believe that nothing can go wrong on a project if you're wearing one of those wrist things.

Achilles was a mighty warrior, but his Achilles' heel was his heel.

Why did we even have that thing?

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

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

It's depressing how many of these are real shirts

Originally, the ceremony used a variety of rodents and mustelids, but over time most people agreed it made sense to standardize on a specific individual ground squirrel in Pennsylvania.

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

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

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

'Come to what?' 'You. Me. This moment.'

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

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

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

This is a fun explanation to prepare your kids for; it's common and totally wrong. Good lines include 'why does the air have to travel on both sides at the same time?' and 'I saw the Wright brothers plane and those wings were curved the same on the top and bottom!'

We were able to replicate and confirm prior authors' detection of a moon orbiting the Earth with high confidence.

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.

Little-known fact: The 'Dawn of Man' opening sequence in 2001 cuts away seconds before the Flintstones theme becomes recognizable.

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

HISTORIANS: We've decided to trim the past down to make things more manageable. Using BCE/CE, would you rather we lose the odd-numbered or even-numbered years?

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

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

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

Stanford sleep researcher William Dement said that after 50 years of studying sleep, the only really solid explanation he knows for why we do it is 'because we get sleepy'.

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

Stephen Douglas actually died soon after the debates and election, but if you demand historical accuracy in your webcomics you should be reading Hark! A Vagrant.

You know that asteroid that almost destroyed Earth in the 90s? Turns out the whole thing was secretly created by Michael Bay, who then PAID Bruce Willis and Ben Affleck to look heroic while blowing it up!

At first I was making fun of them, but joke's on me--the deer is surprisingly ergonomic, except for the kicks.

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.

This also guarantees he won't be one of the ones to get a bobcat.

'But you're using that same tactic to try to feel superior to me, too!' 'Sorry, that accusation expires after one use per conversation.'

Lambda calculus? More like SHAMbda calculus, amirite?

NOW INVENT AN IMPOSSIBLE-TO-TRANSLATE LANGUAGE AND USE IT TO TELL US WHERE THE MONEY IS.

Love and circuit analysis, hand in hand at last.

When I was a kid, I asked my parents why our houses didn't have toothpaste pipes in addition to water ones. I'm strangely pleased to see Amazon thinking the same way.

'You will have hot, steamy, sweaty sex ... IN BED!'

Officer suspended from horse.

'Now, minions, I'm off to inspect our shark cages.' 'Do you really need to inspect them this often?' 'PRISONERS MUST NEVER ESCAPE.'

A lot of Jedi romances start with this turning into a Lady and the Tramp spaghetti situation.

Better change the URL to 'https' before downloading.

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

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

FOR AN INTRIGUING TIME CALL

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

Remember not to take it easy. Put a hot washcloth on your forehead, remain standing, and breathe dry air while taking lots of histamines. You need to give your body a chance to get sick again.

Listen, in a few thousand years you'll invent a game called 'SimCity' which has a 'disaster' button, and then you'll understand.

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

2017 called, but I couldn't understand what they were saying over all the screams.

I'm not listening to you. I mean, what does a SQUIRREL know about mental health?

"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

Also, we have a fort out in the woods where we stashed that hooker's body.

I didn't even realize they MADE a novelization of "Surf Ninjas." How did you-- Oh my god, it's signed by the author?!

Don't worry, the dogs are all fine. That's actually kind of the problem.

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

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

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

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

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

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

My theory is that most humans have been colonized with alien mind-control slugs that hold the earbuds for them, and the ones who can't wear earbuds are the only surviving free ones.

It works because a nautical mile is based on a degree of latitude, and the Earth (e) is a circle.

Guest comic by Bill Amend of FoxTrot, an inspiration to all us nerdy-physics-majors-turned-cartoonists, of which there are an oddly large number.

I'm the proud parent of an honor student, and the person driving me is proud, too!

Hi, I'm your new meteorologist and a former software developer. Hey, when we say 12pm, does that mean the hour from 12pm to 1pm, or the hour centered on 12pm? Or is it a snapshot at 12:00 exactly? Because our 24-hour forecast has midnight at both ends, and I'm worried we have an off-by-one error.

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!

Their Sun and gravity will make you, uh, something, I guess. Out of earshot from Earth, mostly.

The most brutal way I've ever seen someone handle this was 'Oh, you have a girlfriend. Are you going to get married?' 'I, uh, don't know--' 'Well, do you love her?' '...' 'Anyway, what were you saying about the movie?'

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

Verbiage. Va-jay-jay. Irregardless.

U+2A0B ⨋ Mathematicians need to calm down

You may notice the first half of these instructions are similar to the instructions for a working nuclear fusion device. After the first few dozen steps, be sure to press down firmly and fold quickly to overcome fusion pressure.

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!

After a pail of water was thrown on the Wicked Witch of the West outside Salt Lake City, Utah's Great Salt Lake was measured to be 7 parts per trillion witch by volume.

At least there's a general understanding all around that Doctor Who is its own thing.

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

I'm like the Terminator, except with love!

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

In addition to gravity, burritos interact through the strong, weak, and electromagnetic forces, which is believed to be a major contributor to their popularity.

Once again topping the list of tonight's hottest rising stars in Hollywood is ξ Persei!

And the whole setup is just a trap to capture escaping logicians. None of the doors actually lead out.

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

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

The package weighs 7 kg 9 oz.

Now, you may argue that the varying hour lengths and feedback effects would cause chaos. To which I say, yeah, and I'm also curious to see how the weekday cycle interacts with it! So, you in?

ALERT: Human 910-25J-1Q38 has created a Youtube channel. Increase erratic jerkiness of flying by 30% until safely out of range.

As far as I can tell, Navajo doesn't have a common word for 'zero'. do-neh-lini means 'neutral'.

The weak twin primes conjecture states that there are infinitely many pairs of primes. The strong twin primes conjecture states that every prime p has a twin prime (p+2), although (p+2) may not look prime at first. The tautological prime conjecture states that the tautological prime conjecture is true.

Unstoppable force-carrying particles can't interact with immovable matter by definition.

We're underwater on our mortgage thanks to the low price of water.

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

The month names are the same, except that the fourth month only has the name 'April' in even-numbered years, and is otherwise unnamed.

Tomorrow's sessions will be entirely devoted to sewing machine rotary hooks.

To get more knowledge

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

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

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

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

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

Serve one each to guests whose last cursed cocktail was more than 2 months ago.

So he's saying that God thought Hitler's art was so bad that the Holocaust was an acceptable alternative. It's no secret that the hat guy is closely based on Aram, from Men in Hats.

This one is from the Red Belt collection, of 'medium' difficulty.

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

It sounds like a great way to make friends! Is it near that Friend Zone you keep talking about? I wanna go!

Ok, how many coins for a cinnamon roll?

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

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

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

It hurts to be hit there, you know

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

With a good battery, the device can easily last for 5 or 10 years, although the walls probably won't.

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

Maybe someday science will get over its giant collective crush on Richard Feynman. But I doubt it!

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

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.

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

Well, there's one right here at the bottom, where it says "53."

Feels like I picked a bad year to try to start having a healthy relationship with political news.

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

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

I take it Narnia doesn't have Cinnabons? Because if you can magic up a plate of those, I'll betray whoever.

(It's the TMBG Dial-a-Song line, to save you some time.)

It's 10:34 PM for this user. They really need to get going, they have a thing early tomorrow. Are you sure you want to notify?

We remember Rugrats, and think of them every time our kids look at us through their baby gates.

Ugh, it says they attempted delivery but "Nobody was home."

Comes with a 50-lb sack of gender changers, and also an add-on device with a voltage selector and a zillion circular center pin DC adapter tips so you can power any of those devices from the 90s.

"Is the pipeline literally running from your laptop?" "Don't be silly, my laptop disconnects far too often to host a service we rely on. It's running on my phone."

Even if the dictionaries are starting to give in, I refuse to accept 'octopi' as a word mainly because--I'm not making this up--there's a really satisfying climactic scene in the Orson Scott Card horror novel 'Lost Boys' which hinges on it being an incorrect pluralization.

1937-2020

That cat has some serious periodic components

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

If only my ancestors had been fortunate enough to marry into the branch of the bacteria family that could photosynthesize, like all my little green cousins here.

I wasn't a big fan of 3 or Salvation, so I'm trying to resist getting my hopes up too much for Dark Fate, but it's hard. I'm just a sucker for humans and robots traveling through time to try to drive trucks into each other, apparently.

He probably just poops over the side of the sleigh.

If you get an 11/100 on a CS test, but you claim it should be counted as a 'C', they'll probably decide you deserve the upgrade.

Remember, your answers to the physics census are confidential; we will not be issuing Pauli exclusion principle citations.

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

If all else fails, use "significant at a p>0.05 level" and hope no one notices.

When Salvador Dalí died, it took months to get all the flagpoles sufficiently melted.

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...?

Unfortunately for her, real Star Wars fans are attracted to a gal with a good force choke.

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

I got banned from the county fair for handing out Helium-2 balloons. Apparently the instant massive plasma explosions violated some local ordinance or something.

'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.

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

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

It's like they got together and said 'what do we miss most from the internet in 1998? that's right, embedded MIDI!'

How do I work it? IT'S ALREADY WORKING!

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

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

Eww, gross, you modified link()? How could you enjoy abusing a filesystem like that?

The biggest jump is at 11:00am EST (4:00pm UTC) when midnight reaches the UTC+8 time zone. That time zone, which includes China, is home to a quarter of the world's population. India and Sri Lanka (UTC+5:30) put us over the 50% mark soon after.

Luckily, the range is limited by the fact that the square boundary lines follow great circles.

Not only is that terrible in general, but you just KNOW Billy's going to open the root present first, and then everyone will have to wait while the heap is rebuilt.

Another group of mathematicians is working to put an upper bound on the number, although everyone keeps begging them to stop.

I heard they might make the wild card game, which would be cool. Do you know when that is? I have a wedding next weekend, but if it's after that we could try to go!

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

I tried to send a message back, but I accidentally hit 'reply all' and now the ocean is clogged with message bottles.

"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!"

Shoot for the Moon. If you miss, you'll end up co-orbiting the Sun alongside Earth, living out your days alone in the void within sight of the lush, welcoming home you left behind.

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.

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

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

And the baby has a fever.

My bracket was busted in the first round; I had Massachusetts v. Connecticut in the final, probably in a case over who gets to annex Rhode Island.

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

They eventually resolved this self-reference, but Cantor's 'everything-in-the-fetish-book-twice' parties finally sunk the idea.

It's taken me 20 years, but I've finally finished rebuilding all my software to use 33-bit signed ints.

About one in three North American subway stops are in NYC.

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

'I was pretty good at skeet shooting, but was eventually kicked off the range for catching the clay pigeons in a net and dispatching them execution-style.'