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

I think you mean 'GNU Info Override'.

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

And to you, I leave my life-sized ice sculpture replica of the Pietà which was blessed by the Pope. You must never let it melt! Now, remember, all gifts must be removed from my estate within 24 hours.

The less popular 8.8.4.4 is slated for discontinuation.

If only we'd chosen 1944-12-02 08:45:52 as the Unix epoch, we could've combined two doomsday scenarios into one and added a really boring scene to that Roland Emmerich movie.

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

They're not generally used for crewed spacecraft because astronauts HATE going around the corners.

Chemists actually find it simpler to define a general odor of rotten eggs as a baseline, and the LACK of rotten eggs as a distinct smell.

"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.

Someone get that Pachelbel's Canon kid a recording contract, stat.

My friend Finn tried to mail one end of the cable to me and thread the mail system.

Nothing personal, high schoolers.

Protip: You can win every exchange just by being one level more precise than whoever talked last. Eventually, you'll defeat all conversational opponents and stand alone.

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

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

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

This is how I explain computer problems to my cat. My cat usually seems happier than me.

The xkcd Survey: Big Data for a Big Planet

Ahem. We are STRICTLY an Orbiter shop.

Controls are a little hard to figure out.

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

'You see the same pattern all over. Take Detroit--' 'Hold on. Why do you know all these statistics offhand?' 'Oh, um, no idea. I definitely spend my evenings hanging out with friends, and not curating a REALLY NEAT database of temperature statistics. Because, pshh, who would want to do that, right? Also, snowfall records.'

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

Hey, why do YOU get to be the president of Tautology Clu-- wait, I can guess.

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

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

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.

Click and drag.

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

I like trying to make it as hard as possible. "I'd love to meet up, maybe in a few days? Next week is looking pretty empty. *witchcraft"

Dad, where is Grandpa right now?

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

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

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

I pronounce the 'u' in 'pronunciation' like in 'putting' but the 'ou' in 'pronounce' like in 'wound'.

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.

I still don't understand why the Sun paid the extra money for Transitions lenses.

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.

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

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

The nice thing about headcannnons is that it's really easy to get other people to believe in them.

She referenced Billie Eilish, so this must be getting pretty close to the pandemic. But we've seen the last two years in-universe, so if it's set in the future, they must be in at least 2023 by now. [*adds thumbtacks and string to wall*]

We could go to the theater across town and see if it's opened THERE yet, but we don't want to lose our place in line.

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

To be fair, the braised and confused newt on a bed of crushed Doritos turned out to be delicious.

No, wait, come back! I want to be friends at you!

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

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

The rare compound solar-lunar-nephelogical eclipse

If you repeatedly rerun the development of technological civilization, it turns out that for some reason the only constant is that there is always a networking utility called 'netcat', though it does a different thing in each one.

It's like they say, you gotta fight fire with clichés.

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

WHY DON'T YOU COME HANG OUT INSIDE MY HOUSE. WE CAN COOK BREAD AND CHAT ABOUT OUR INTERNAL SKELETONS.

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.

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

On the other hand, poor Samara -- transcoded to FLV. No one deserves that.

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

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

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

I'm always so happy that I successfully navigated the introduction that I completely forget to pay attention to the name the other person told me.

To get more knowledge

Took me five tries to find the right one, but I managed to salvage our night out--if not the boat--in the end.

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

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

In-universe, Bart Simpson and Harry Potter were the same age in 1990. Bart is perpetually 10 years old because of a spell put on his town by someone trying to keep him from getting his Hogwarts letter.

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

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

Themistocles said his infant son ruled all Greece -- "Athens rules all Greece; I control Athens; my wife controls me; and my infant son controls her." Thus, nowadays the world is controlled by whoever buys advertising time on Dora the Explorer.

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

I never understood why someone would expect me to accept their rules right after they'd punched me. I'm sure it's all very symbolic or something.

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

To get serious analyses of hurricanes and oil slicks, see Jeff Masters' blog. To get serious discussions of worst-case scenario thinking, see Bruce Schneier's blog. To get enough Vitamin D, don't read any blogs and go outside instead.

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.'

On one hand, every single one of my ancestors going back billions of years has managed to figure it out. On the other hand, that's the mother of all sampling biases.

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

In the new edition of The Giving Tree, the tree uses social tools to share with its friend all the best places to buy things.

And every day it gets harder to fight the urge to su to the user and freak people out.

The best thing about Strunk/White fanfiction is that it's virtually guaranteed to be well written.

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

The wars between the "OTHER PRIMATES OPEN THEM FROM THE SMALL END" faction versus the "BUT THE LITTLE BIT OF BANANA AT THE SMALL END IS GROSS" faction consumed Europe for generations.

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

WARNING: This item was aged by the same inexorable passage of time that also processes nuts.

The BBC lead was 'The elusive erogenous zone said to exist in some women may be a myth, say researchers who have hunted for it.' I couldn't read it with a straight face.

They laugh now, but within 10 years the city's entire criminal class will have quit to work on space research.

Before I install any patch, I always open the patch notes and Ctrl-F for 'supervolcano', 'seagull', and 'garbage disposal', just to be safe.

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

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

We all remember those famous first words spoken by an astronaut on the surface of Mars: "That's one small step fo- HOLY SHIT LOOK OUT IT'S GOT SOME KIND OF DRILL! Get back to the ... [unintelligible] ... [signal lost]"

I will vote, no questions asked, for any candidate who describes themselves as 'more of a deficit sugar glider.'

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

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

They should add a little sticker that certifies that the humidifier supports water conservation, but in the sense of energy conservation or momentum conservation.

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

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

DUCKLOOP'D?

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

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

Living in the southern hemisphere was nice because I could jump extra high, but I like it here too. Besides, if I ever want to move back, I can just curl up in a ball and wait!

Surely (no one/everyone) will (recognize how flexible and useful this architecture is/spend a huge amount of effort painstakingly preserving and updating this garbage I wrote in 20 minutes)

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

"Are you concerned the witches won't breed in captivity?" "Honestly, we're more concerned that they WILL. We don't know what it involves, but our biologists theorize that it's 'harrowing.'"

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...?

And watch out for that guy from comic #53.

WAKE up in the MORning and my BREATH ain't PREtty / and noBODY'S gonna KISS me if my MOUTH smells SHItty / so I ALways brush my TEETH before I START on the JACK / sure, my DRINKing's out of HAND, but I'm conTROLLing my PLAQUE.

Instead of bobcat, package contained chair.

This happens in geek circles every so often. The 'Hey, this is just a system I can figure out easily!' is also a problem among engineers first diving into the stock market.

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

Pronouncing [ṡṡċċḣḣẇẇȧȧ] is easy; you just say it like the 'x' in 'fire'.

Hard to believe that for so many years once they were fully extended we just let them tip over.

He probably just poops over the side of the sleigh.

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

Luckily, unlike in our previous study, we have no reason to believe Evangeline the Adulterator gained access to our stored doses.

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

Bacteria still outweigh us thousands to one--and that's not even counting the several pounds of them in your body.

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?'.

It's hard living somewhere with antlions, because every time you find one of their traps, you feel compelled to spend all day constructing a tiny model of Jabba's sail barge next to it.

[holding up a three-phase motor] As you can see here, the problem is that the humidifier I took this from is broken.

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

If you don't get this one, don't google it.

The no-communication theorem states that no communication about the no-communication theorem can clear up the misunderstanding quickly enough to allow faster-than-light signaling.

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

Biologists play reverse Pokémon, trying to avoid putting any one team member on the front lines long enough for the experience to cause evolution.

The state has had so many contact tracers disappear into that shop that they've had to start a contact tracer tracing program.

OCEAN PLAY AREA RULES: No running, no horseplay, no megatsunamis, and no trying to pry the wreck of the Titanic off the bottom.

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

Viruses so far have been really disappointing on the 'disable the internet' front, and time is running out. When Linux/Mac win in a decade or so the game will be over.

I'm hoping 2022 is relatively normal because I don't know what symbol comes after the asterisk and the dagger.

Every choice, no matter how small, begins a new story.

There are two rules on this ship: Never gaze back into the projection abyss, and never touch the red button labeled DYMAXION.

I was really impressed by the accuracy of some of the report's predictions about fossil fuel consumption. Then I realized, oh, right, of course.

Now that airlines have started adding wheel locks to their drink carts, less than half of flights have one accidentally fall out through the hole.

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

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

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.

Cue angry letters from all seven fans of Xenocide.

I asked them if it was safe to be running tours during the pandemic. They said, "During the what?"

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

... I wanna try. Hang on, be right back.

To combat the threat, many airlines are installing wing-mounted spray bottles.

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

Refs generally say that you can exercise enough altitude control to avoid the ground, but if you start strategically choosing air layers to steer yourself, that's traveling.

You absolute-fucking-... shit.

That cat has some serious periodic components

'Welcome to the future! Nothing's changed.' was the slogan of my astonishingly short-lived tech startup.

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

Uh-oh.

It says to cut the onions into 1/4" slices, but I'd better correct for length contraction.

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

If you think space elevators are good, but just too boring and practical, check out the 'space fountain'.

There are a lot of graduate-educated young-earth creationists.

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.

'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.

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

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

If you ever want to get beaten up by a bunch of graphic designers, try removing the serifs from Times New Roman and adding them to Comic Sans.

I mean, I can barely hear myself complaining about Battlestar Galactica.

The real key was inventing the windmill-powered winch.

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

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

Don't forget the time you spend finding the chart to look up what you save. And the time spent reading this reminder about the time spent. And the time trying to figure out if either of those actually make sense. Remember, every second counts toward your life total, including these right now.

I'm reading a goddamn book, thank you very much.

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

It's so sad how almost no one alive today can remember seeing the galactic rainbow, the insanity nebula, or the skull and glowing eyes of the Destroyer of Sagittarius.

'Oh yeah? Give me 50 milliscore reasons why I should stop.'

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

And the heaven departed as a scroll when it is rolled together, but then more heaven kept appearing to replace it, as if the scroll was infinite.

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

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.

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

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

I guess if she accepted irrational realities, she'd hardly be my fantasy.

That's my hat! You took my hat!

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

Maybe there's no tenderness in her fingertips either, but at least SHE puts out.

Lambda calculus? More like SHAMbda calculus, amirite?

Tag yourself, I'm "frayed."

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

What sins could possibly darken the heart of a STEAMBOAT? I asked The Shadow, but he says he only covers men.

[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]

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

Some of you may be thinking, 'But wait, isn't the brightest star in our sky the Sun?' I think that's a great question and you should totally ask it. On the infinite tree of possible conversations spread out before us, I think that's definitely the most promising branch.

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.'

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.

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

We once got grounded when we convinced the FAA to block flights through our county because of ash clouds.

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

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

Never give your password or bank account number to anyone who doesn't have a blue check mark next to their name.

With just one extra line, he could have anticipated the 2003 film The Core, but some things are too audacious for even the greatest visionaries.

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.

The Range Mischief Officer has modified the trajectory to add a single random spin somewhere in the flight, but won't tell us where.

Other high scorers are melt-in-your-hand aluminum-destroying gallium and tritium-powered glowsticks. Lawn darts are toward the other end.

'Detector! What would the Bayesian statistician say if I asked him whether the--' [roll] 'I AM A NEUTRINO DETECTOR, NOT A LABYRINTH GUARD. SERIOUSLY, DID YOUR BRAIN FALL OUT?' [roll] '... yes.'

It's not as big a loss as it looks, because now I have leftover supplies, which will help me talk myself into doing this all over again with a new project!

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

Ground-pole-ball-pole can be fun if you shake the first pole to get the second one whipping around dangerously, but the ball at the joint gets torn apart pretty fast.

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

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

As always, you are permitted to call one person for guidance, but that person must be a grandparent.

Neither a spokesperson for the organization nor the current world champion could be reached for comment.

The malaria party was David's idea

Trains rotate the Earth around various axes while elevators shift its position in space.

Yes, the cosmic microwave background is great, but what about the earthly microwave foreground?

...wait until they type in payment information, then use it to order yourself a replacement phone.

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

Then it switched to these old black-and-white tapes of Bob Ross slumped against the wall of an empty room, painting the least happy trees you've ever seen. Either PBS needs to beef up studio security or I need to stop using Ambien to sleep.

It ships with a version of Google Now that alerts you when it's too late to leave for your appointments.

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

'Cheater!' 'Hey, gaming on wifi? You have only yourself to blame.'

LIFEHACKS: You can just take all the luggage off the airport conveyer belt and leave with it. They don't check that it's yours at the door!

As if these problems weren't NP-hard enough.

The company started out exploiting a loophole in the law banning scooters. The city was mad at first, but then they noticed how much they were saving on street cleaning.

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.'

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

BABIES OR LITERATURE BUT NOT BOTH: Baby shoes

The rest is fear of raptors.

That eggplant is in something of a flaccid state.

If data fails the Teacher's t test, you can just force it to take the test again until it passes.

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

Oh no, they set up a roadblock which is just a sign with the entire 'Czech hedgehog' article printed on it.

Remember the CPS 2000, the super soaker that was discontinued because it was too powerful? Relatedly, can I borrow your tuba?

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.

Fixating on this seems unhealty. But in general, the more likely I think a crash is, the less likely one becomes, which is a strange kind of reverse placebo effect.

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

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

Legally-mandated information would be printed on the back or discreetly along the bottom. In small letters under the nutrition information it would say 'Like our products? Visit our website!' There would be no URL.

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

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

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.

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

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.

After a power outage at the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, the new Digital Doomsday Clock is flashing 00:00 and mushroom clouds keep appearing and then retracting once a second.

Guest comic by Zach Weiner of Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal. When I was stressed out, Zach gave me a talk that was really encouraging and somehow involved nanobots.

We'll turn the asteroid belt into ball bearings to go between different rings orbiting at different speeds.

At my OLD school, we used Microsoft Encarta 2005.

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.

The dump also contains a list of millions of prime factors, a 0-day Tamagotchi exploit, and a technique for getting gcc and bash to execute arbitrary code.

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

No, of course we don't microwave the mug WITH the teabag in it. We microwave the teabag separately.

The moment their arms spun freely in our air, they were doomed -- for Man has earned his right to hold this planet against all comers, by virtue of occasionally producing someone totally batshit insane.

The math and philosophy people also claim everything, but the astronomers argue that the stuff they study really only comprises a small number of paper surfaces.

I think the IETF hit the right balance with the 128 bits thing. We can fit MAC addresses in a /64 subnet, and the nanobots will only be able to devour half the planet.

Family going to bed at 10 PM is so much worse than jet lag.

If Google Maps stops letting you navigate to (Clay County District) A in West Virginia, you can try Jump, OH -> Ina, IL -> Big Hole, TX.

Directions from CITY OF TROY to ITHACA / Total time: 10y 54d 14h 25m / Warning: Route crosses an international border / route includes capture by the goddess Calypso / route includes a ferry

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

I am so excited about the Kepler mission. This is the second most important thing our species has ever done, right behind inventing the concept of delivery pizza.

This is silly, of course. The enemy will be born in the network.

You roll for initiative, and ... [roll] ... wow, do you ever take it.

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

The 8th panel is my favorite

Next, let's assume the decision of whether to take the Axiom of Choice is made by a deterministic process ...

It all came flat-packed in Pandora's Box.

Or the pressure at the Earth's core will rise slightly.

"This seems more like a way to attract turkey vultures." "My mom always told me a turkey vulture is just a friend you haven't met yet, usually because you don't smell enough like decaying meat."

Otherwise known as Margaret the Destroyer, I will bring pain to the the Great One. Then again, maybe I won't.

One good trick, if you get called on a fake service, is to build a working version of it and mention it again the next week.

Hopefully the HVAC people set it to only affect the AIR in the room.

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

It's like the traveling salesman problem, but the endpoints are different and you can't ask your friends for help because they're sitting three seats down.

If replacing all the '3's doesn't fix your code, remove the 4s, too, with 'ceiling(pi) / floor(pi) * pi * r^floor(pi)'. Mmm, floor pie.

This scavenger hunt is getting boring. Let's go work on the treehouse!

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!

I bet if I yell at my scared friends I will feel better.

IT'S ALL REAL

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

And I could replace you with older pictures of you, from back when you looked happy.

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.

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

The number one rule of string manipulation is that youâ€™ve got to specify your encodings.

[after a minute] "Okay, I think I've got it, thanks. Can I--" "oOOOooOOooo!"

[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.'

As the 'exotic animals in homemade aprons hosting baking shows' YouTube craze reached its peak in March 2020, Andrew Cuomo announced he was replacing the Statue of Liberty with a bronze pangolin in a chef's hat.

Don't click on the wing.

If you're not completely satisfied with the phone after 30 days, we will return you to your home at no cost.

But to us there is but one God, plus or minus one. --1 Corinthians 8:6±2.

These new Bluetooth socks are great, but it's troubling to learn that I average almost 14 hours of Shoe Time a day.

My decal set has no adults, just a sea of hundreds of the little girl figures closing in around a single cat.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

The Pioneer anomaly is due to the force of my love.

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

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

I'm like a prisoner in Plato's Cave, seeing only the shade you throw on the wall.

'Well, there's speculation that it's due to a mantle hotspot.' --a geologist who's trying to cover up the fact that they didn't hear your question

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

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

I don't even *want* this package! Why did I join the stinging insect of the month club, anyway?

Scary thought #138: Raptors coming down the waterslide behind me.

You make forgetting look so easy.

"Want to feel old?" "Yes."

They said after I got into a routine, I'd enjoy getting progressively stronger and stop whining so much about how hard exercise was. Well, they were half right!

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

The most ridiculous offender of all is the sudoers man page, which for 15 years has started with a 'quick guide' to EBNF, a system for defining the grammar of a language. 'Don't despair', it says, 'the definitions below are annotated.'

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

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

Edward Tufte's 'The Visual Display of Quantitative Information' is a fantastic book, and should be required reading for anyone in either the sciences or graphic design.

Then I'm going to go on a weeks-long somatic hypermutation bender, producing ever-more targeted antibodies, while I continue to remain distanced and follow guidance from public health authorities.

Each quarter of the lanes from left to right correspond loosely to breast cancer stages one through four (at diagnosis).

This one is a little bland. Pass the saltshaker?

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.

Also, they're getting increasingly worried that someone will accidentally hit the 'retract' button, and that the end of the cable thrashing around as it winds up could devastate the Earth's surface.

At 8 drinks, you switch the torrent from FreeBSD to Microsoft Bob. C'mon, it'll be fun!

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

The worst resolution to the Valentine Prisoner's Dilemma when YOU decide not to give your partner a present but your PARTNER decides to testify against you in the armed robbery case.

Most properties can only boast INDOOR heated floors.

Maybe someday I'll get to write the Wikipedia article about this place! Wait, damn, original research.

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.

I've looked at clouds from both sides now.

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

They're robust against quantum attacks because it's hard to make a quantum system that large.

this calculator implements the simple throwing distance estimation model from the how to throw things chapter of the book how to

My first try at drawing a real face in years

It wasn't originally constitutionally required, but presidents who served two terms have traditionally followed George Washington's example and gotten false teeth.

Click to see a video of a modern bird using stability flapping during predatory behavior. It all fits! Also, apparently Microraptor had *four* wings? The past keeps getting cooler! (And there's more of it every day!)

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

Someday I just know I'm going to encounter a problem that requires 500 flashlights and 700 knives with weird holes in them, and on that day I won't be caught unprepared.

There's always the hope that if you sit and watch for long enough, the beachball will vanish and the thing it interrupted will return.

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.

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

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

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

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.

And the journal is filled with all the things I'd say to her if I were nice like you. I burn it when it's full.

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

I'm in talks with Netflix to produce an alternate-universe crime drama about the world where sliced bread was never re-legalized, but it's going slowly because they keep changing their phone numbers and the door lock codes at their headquarters.

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.

'The mountains near here formed when the ... Newfoundland ... microplate collided with, uhh ... Labrador.' 'Ok, now you're definitely just naming dogs.' 'Wait, no, that's actually almost correct.'

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

I like the idea of cartograms (distorted population maps), but I feel like in practice they often end up being the worst of both worlds—not great for showing geography OR counting people. And on top of that, they have all the problems of a chloro... chorophl... chloropet... map with areas colored in.

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

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

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.

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

I don't know what's more telling--the number of pages in the Wikipedia talk page argument over whether the 1/87.0857143 scale is called "HO" or "H0", or the fact that within minutes of first hearing of it I had developed an extremely strong opinion on the issue.

Ingress: Foursquare With Space Noises.

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

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.

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

Also known as the Black Mirror-Mythbusters scale.

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.

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

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

Did you know sociologists can't explain why people keep repeating that urban legend about bumblebees not being able to fly!?

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

It's pi plus C, of course.

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.

The other side of USB-C is rotationally symmetric except that the 3rd pin from the top is designated FIREWIRE TRIBUTE PIN.

He holds the laptop like that on purpose, to make you cringe.

Soon, linguists will be wandering around everywhere, saying things like "colorless green ideas sleep furiously" and "more people have been to Russia than I have," and speech will become unintelligible.

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

No, only LAVA is called 'magma' while underground. Any other object underground is called 'lava'.

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

Just thought you should know

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

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

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

I'm only willing to visit placid lakes, salt flats, and painting exhibits until the world's 3D technology improves.

At one point, by force of childhood habit, the doctor accidentally removed three or four organs.

Bluetooth is actually named for the tenth-century Viking king Harald "Bluetooth" Gormsson, but the protocol developed by Harald was a wireless charging standard unrelated to the modern Bluetooth except by name.

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'.

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

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

Every downhill walk is a waterslide that might have been.

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

The theory finally unifies cosmic inflation and regular inflation.

"You know lightning, right? When electric charge builds up in a cloud and then discharges in a giant spark? Ask me why that happens." "Why does tha--" "No clue. We think it's related to the hair thing."

You could at least not wear the lab coat everywhere, dude.

Following this, the pong paddle went on a mission to destroy Atari headquarters and, due to a mixup, found himself inside the game The Matrix Reloaded. Boy, was THAT ever hard to explain to him.

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

It's commonly believed that Lorentz contraction makes objects appear flatter along the direction of travel. However, this ignores light travel times. In fact, a fast-moving butt would appear rotated toward the observer but not substantially distorted. Shakira was right.

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

I don't understand why anyone would pay full price for a flatbed truck rental when you can buy 'DETOUR' signs online for like $10.

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

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

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.

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

'Nuh-uh! We let users vote on comments and display them by number of votes. Everyone knows that makes it impossible for a few persistent voices to dominate the discussion.'

Hang on, we got a call from the feds. They say we can do whatever with him, but the EPA doesn't want that laptop in the ocean. They're sending a team.

They tried to report me to the authorities, but because I had the device they couldn't charge me.

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

When I began trying to form a new claim by stitching together these parts in such an unnatural way, some called me mad.

Of course, the assert doesn't work.

What's weirder is that muons turned out to be INCREDIBLY cute.

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

I don't understand the things you do, and you therefore may represent an interaction with the quantum vacuum virtual plasma.

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.

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

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

For the first time ever, the phrase 'I'd like to thank everyone at 4chan for making me successful and happy' is uttered.

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

And given how much of my stuff they go through, they definitely know where I live.

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

I'm entering my 24th year of spending eight hours a day firing the Duck Hunt gun at the flying toasters. I'm sure I'll hit one soon.

I just spent 20 minutes deciding whether to start an email with 'Hi' or 'Hey', so I think it transferred correctly.