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Magnetohydrodynamics combines the intuitive nature of Maxwell's equations with the easy solvability of the Navier-Stokes equations. It's so straightforward physicists add "relativistic" or "quantum" just to keep it from getting boring.

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

MY RESULTS ARE A SIGNIFICANT IMPROVEMENT ON THE STATE OF THE AAAAAAAAAAAART

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.

Fortunately, the internet has a virtually inexhaustible supply of code that doesn't work and people who are wrong, which bodes well for a return to normalcy. [Note: Click to read context for the cancer comics. She's doing well.]

Uh-oh.

[shortly] ... he ate ALL of it!?

And now I might never get to again.

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.

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

You know that I'll never leave you. Not as long as she's with someone.

These signals seem to be pre-star-formation but post-Malone.

Mmmm, this is such a positive experience! I feel no social pressure to enjoy it at all!

I always felt like what the 'you are now aware of your tongue' thing needed in order to be truly enjoyable was an element of mortal peril.

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

Eärendil will patrol the walls of night only until the sun reaches red giant stage, engulfing the Morning Star on his brow. Light and high beauty are passing things as well.

I adopted a cat that weighs 12 solar masses. Laser pointers love chasing it.

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

It's hard to believe, but lots of kids these days ONLY know how to buy prepackaged molecules.

'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!'

I'm working to bring about a superintelligent AI that will eternally torment everyone who failed to make fun of the Roko's Basilisk people.

Stay right there, we'll be back in a minute. We've just gotta brainstorm some new wonders. Have you all figured out gears yet? Yes? Crap.

I understand modern autogyros are much more stable, so I've probably angered the autogyro people by impugning their safety. Once they finish building the autogyros they've been working on in their garages for 10 years, they'll come after me.

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

Texting should work. Unless the message is too long, in which case it gets converted to voicemails, and I think I'm locked out of my voicemail.

I know a lot of people hate these, but I prefer them to touchpads.

'No idea what I was thinking! Haha! But anyway, maybe we should check out what this Ba'al guy has to say.'

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

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

Although I hear they were caught cheating off of Rosalind, who sat at a desk in front of them.

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

Good thing we're too smart to spend all day being uselessly frustrated with ourselves. I mean, that'd be a hell of a waste, right?

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

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

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.

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

Not sure why I just taught everyone to flawlessly impersonate me to pretty much anyone I know. Just remember to constantly bring up how cool it is that birds are dinosaurs and you'll be set.

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

Hang on, let me scare the live raccoon over to the same side as the dead one.

Not actual size, except technically at one spot near the left.

I still think the Cold Stone Creamery partnership was a good idea, but I should have asked before doing the first market trials during the cryogenic mirror tests.

Films need to do this more, if only to piss off the people who have to feed it into the projector.

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

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.

The chemistry experiment had me figuratively -- and then shortly thereafter literally -- glued to my seat.

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

There's a supposed Mark Twain quote, "The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco." It isn't really by Mark Twain, but I don't know who said it—I just know they've never been to McMurdo Station.

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

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

'Grandpa, what was it like in the Before time?' 'It was hell. People went around saying glass was a slow-flowing liquid. You folks these days don't know how good you have it.'

Deep in some corner of my heart, I suspect that real times tables are wrong about 6x7=42 and 8x7=56.

Using a ring to bind someone you covet into your dark and twisted world? Wow, just got the subtext there. Also, the apparently eager Beyoncé would've made one badass Nazgȗl.

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

The AYB retro-return-date (Zero Wing Zero Hour) should be around AD 2021.

Please, we need your help. Our research suggests you're the last living descendant of the person who knew how to format this config file.

The 2007 Bridge to Terebithia trailer put me off too much to see that particular movie, but I am cautiously optimistic about Where the Wild Things Are.

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

A laptop battery contains roughly the stored energy of a hand grenade, and if shorted it ... hey! You can't arrest me if I prove your rules inconsistent!

ADDITIONAL NOTES: Fixed a bug that caused some rocks to generate virtually infinite heat while just sitting there.

On the plus side, she wrote 'Welcome to the AAA Club!' in lipstick on the bathroom mirror, and left me a membership/roadside assistance card on the counter.

It's much better than the other one.

CIRCULAR VIDEO - PROS: Solves aspect ratio problem. CONS: Never trust anyone who talks to you from inside a circle.

Thank you to linguist Gretchen McCulloch for teaching me about phonetic assimilation, and for teaching me that if you stand around in public reading texts from a linguist and murmuring example phrases to yourself, people will eventually ask if you're okay.

I pray GunPistolMan never learns the word 'sheeple'.

Their crash investigation team had some particularly harsh words for Dave Matthews.

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

The definitions I grew up with were that a geek is someone unusually into something (so you could have computer geeks, baseball geeks, theater geeks, etc) and nerds are (often awkward) science, math, or computer geeks. But definitions vary.

I've just received word that the Emperor has dissolved the MIT computer science program permanently.

This only makes it more urgent that we adopt my roadmap for the next 10 years, which should put us solidly in the lead.

To anyone who understands information theory and security and is in an infuriating argument with someone who does not (possibly involving mixed case), I sincerely apologize.

Sure, it may not meet science fair standards, but I want credit for getting my baking soda and vinegar mountain added to the Decade Volcanoes list.

Every time we detect an asteroid from outside the Solar System, we should immediately launch a mission to fling one of our asteroids back in the direction it came from.

How about posts that are public, but every time a company accesses a bunch of them, the API makes their CEO's account click 'like' on one of them at random so you get a notification.

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

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

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?

Telescopes and bathyscaphes and sonar probes of Scottish lakes, Tacoma Narrows bridge collapse explained with abstract phase-space maps, some x-ray slides, a music score, Minard's Napoleonic war: the most exciting new frontier is charting what's already here.

cerebrospinal fluid, pericardial fluid, sputum, aqueous humor, perilymph, chyme, hydatid fluid, interstitial fluid, rheum, and gin.

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

Man, this trick has saved me so many times.

If my country ever picks a new national flag, this is on my shortlist for designs to argue for, but I think in the end I'll go with the green puzzle piece or broken image thumbnail.

If you'd just agree to hold your meetings in here, you'd have PLENTY of time to figure things out before the deadline.

A lot of sentences undergo startling shifts in mood if you add 'like this one' to the end, but high on the list is 'I'm a neurologist studying dreams.'

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!

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

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

They actually started the reversed-text practice in 1977 -- not for ease-of-reading reasons, but because too many people were driving backward down the highway blasting the Star Wars opening theme.

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

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

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

I honestly didn't think you could even USE emoji in variable names. Or that there were so many different crying ones.

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!

You don't use science to show that you're right, you use science to become right.

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

There's a maximum likelihood that I'm doing phylogenetics wrong.

CLIMAX is good, but SEXCLIMAX is even better.

Personally I think mercury is more of a 'wet earth' hybrid element.

When speaking out loud, you can can call it the 'Perseids meatier shower' and no one will ever know. (If you do get caught somehow, just tell them to Google the 'Kentucky meat shower' and that will distract them while you escape.)

I don't dig pit traps and cover them with sticks and a thin layer of leaves nearly as much as I expected; I find a chance to do it barely once a month.

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

After changing it back and forth several times and consulting with internet linguist Gretchen McCulloch, I settled on "ok" in my book How To, but I'm still on the fence. Maybe I should just switch to "oK."

I should make a list of all the things I could be trying to optimize, prioritized by ... well, I guess there are a few different variables I could use. I'll create a spreadsheet ...

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

I know the etiquette is controversial, but I think it's rude when the person in front of me reclines their seat into the bell of my trumpet.

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

I'm leaving you for your twin. He's more mature than you by now.

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

The ISO 216 standard ratio is cos(45°), but American letter paper is 8.5x11 because it uses radians, and 8.5/11 = pi/4.

The 'controlled demolition' theory was concocted by the government to distract us. '9/11 was an inside job' was an inside job!

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.

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

Their 'best philosophy of epistemology' picks are great, but you can tell they're struggling a little in the 'why you should trust us' section.

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

'Where were you when you learned you'd won?' 'I was actually asleep; I woke up when I refreshed the webite and saw the news.'

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

There, I showed you it.

Linguists, settling some inscrutable grudge, have been steadily sneaking more backdated synonyms for 'sharing borders' into the dictionary. They've added 'contiguous,' 'coterminous,' 'conterminous,' and next year they're adding 'conterguous.'

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

This map preserves the shapes of Tissot's indicatrices pretty well, as long as you draw them in before running the resize.

It's definitely an intentional foul, but we've decided it's worth it.

NASA tries to coordinate launch timing with the Care Bears' cloud castle, but unfortunately sometimes collisions with stray Care Bears are unavoidable, so they just try to make the fairings sturdy and hope for a glancing impact.

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

I'm a big fan of Kurt Halsey

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

My optimizer uses content-aware inpainting to fill in all the wasted whitespace in the code, repeating the process until it compiles.

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.

'Will [ ] allow us to better understand each other and thus make war undesirable?' is one that pops up whenever we invent a new communication medium.

[They do not move.]

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

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

Learning arcane bullshit from the 80s can break your computer, but if you're willing to wade through arcane bullshit from programmers in the 90s and 2000s, you can break everyone else's computers, too.

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

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

High-speed collisions at the Baby Park track may support the hypothesis that Daisy is her own evil twin, a theory first suggested by Nintendo in the game Majorana's Mask.

169 is a baker's gross.

"Okay, that was weird, but the product reveal was normal. I think the danger is pas--" "One more thing." "Oh no."

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.

Not to go all sentence fragment on you.

You don't want the nitrogen percentage to be too high or you run the risk of eutrophication.

It's amazing what it does for YouTube comments.

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

To ensure lasting immunity, doctors recommend destroying a second Death Star some time after the first.

To get more knowledge

I remember trying to log in to the original Command and Conquer servers a year or two back and feeling like I was knocking on the boarded-up gates of a ghost town.

The prosecution calls Gottfried Leibniz.

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

Disgusting

The film is set in 2018, but when Commander Bremberly chases the hologram through Times Square, there's a billboard for Avengers: Age of Ultron. Depending on the date, that billboard would have been advertising either Infinity War or this movie.

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

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

I was almost fired from a job driving the hearse in funeral processions, but then the funeral home realized how much business I was creating for them.

Forever comparing, never evaluating on any external scale. If you were a sort function, you'd never break the nlogn barrier.

After initial tests created a series of large holes in the wall of the lab, the higher-power Scanning Tunneling Tennis Ball Microscope project was quickly shut down.

[Political pundit on the ScrabbleTV News channel] "After four years of defying orthographic pressure, Joe ceded the top of the ticket to Kamala, who--after considering Josh, Mark, Andy, Roy, and Pete--picked Tim."

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

Or whatever's handy! I'm pretty much pure alcohol and water, so it doesn't really matter!

We didn't believe you at first, but we asked like three people who were at that party. They not only corroborated your story, but even said you totally mentioned wanting to start a company someday. Sorry! If this isn't enough money, let us know.

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

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.

The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine or Home Improvement or DIY

'Meet hot young singles in your mom's basement today'? Man, screw you, GeoIP.

The xkcd Survey: Big Data for a Big Planet

Screw these 36-degree angles. I'm converting to Judaism.

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!

Actual quote from The Demo: '... an advantage of being online is that it keeps track of who you are and what you’re doing all the time ...'

[proudly greeting the hotel manager at the door] "Did I do a good job?"

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

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

I'm gonna have to add something to the strum bar so it makes a clicky sound like the old controllers. I'm so used to the feedback; the silence throws me off.

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

If so great a deductive mind as Arthur Conan Doyle can be fooled by the Cottingley Deepfakes, what chance do we mortals have? Soon our very reality will be dictated by the whims of Frances (9) and Elsie (16).

Anyone who says that they're great at communicating but 'people are bad at listening' is confused about how communication works.

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

Here, if you know the number of days until the vernal equinox, I can point you to the theater using my pocket Stonehenge.

My normal approach is useless here, too.

I'm gonna call the cops and get Chad arrested for theft, then move all my stuff to the house across the street. Hopefully the owners there are more responsible.

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

Geometry textbooks always try to trick you by adding decorative stripes and dotted lines.

Plus they take like 9%.

You can find a perfect correlation if you just control for the residual.

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

We've met! I remember you when you were thiiiis tall! [*holds a hand an inch above their head*]

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

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

Bonus points if you can identify the science in question

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

We find you guilty of closing your torrents as soon as they finish. Your sentence is unremovable Hungarian subtitles on everything.

'The zero line in WMM2025 passes through a lot of population centers; I wonder what year the largest share of the population lived in a zone of less than 5° of declination,' he thought, derailing all other tasks for the rest of the day.

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

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

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

Yes, there are a lot of longing looks across the bridge of Galactica first, but that's beside the point!

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.

But THIS guy, he might be for real!

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

Look, you can't complain about this after giving us so many scenarios involving N locked chests and M unlabeled keys.

Prediction for Carlsen v. Anand: ... 25. Qb8+ Nxb8 26. Rd8# f6 27. "... dude." Qf5 28. "The game is over, dude." Qxg5 29. Rxe8 0-1 30. "Dude, your move can't be '0-1'. Don't write that down." [Black flips board]

The projection does a good job preserving both distance and azimuth, at the cost of really exaggerating how many South Americas there are.

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

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.

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

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!

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

I'm a solipsistic conspiracy theorist. I'm sure I must be up to something, and I will not stop until I find out what.

I had fun visiting the museum at Dover Air Force Base, unless they don't have a museum, in which case I've never been to Delaware in my life.

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

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?)

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

Pool on the roof must've sprung a leak.

I also have an utterance. Less of an utterance and more of an incantation. Less of an incantation and more of a malediction. Less of a malediction and more of a Word of Power. Less of a Word of Power and more of an Unforgivable Curse.

The bug report was marked 'could not reproduce'.

I've lived in the present for my whole life and I'm not about to move now.

"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."

Remember, models aren't for telling you facts, they're for exploring dynamics. This model apparently explores time travel.

Perhaps you need a crash course in taking hints. Here's your first lesson: We're not actually walking somewhere together; I'm trying to leave this conversation and you're following me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The less common, even worse outcome: "3: [everyone in the financial system] WOW, where did all my money just go?"

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

Despite having now taken three months longer than the airplane people, we're making disappointingly little progress toward the obvious next stage of vehicle: The Unobtanium-hulled tunneling ship from the 2003 film 'The Core.'

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

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

This is probably the first projection in cartographic history that can be criticized for its disproportionate focus on Finland, Mongolia, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

But still, my scheme for creating and saving user config files and data locally to preserve them across reinstalls might be useful for--wait, that's cookies.

It's important to learn the moves that take you into the vortex, but it's best not to study vortex itself too closely. Even grandmasters who have built up a tolerance lose the ability to play for a few hours after studying it.

Did he just go crazy and jump out the window?

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

So far Voyager 1 has 'left the Solar System' by passing through the termination shock three times, the heliopause twice, and once each through the heliosheath, heliosphere, heliodrome, auroral discontinuity, Heaviside layer, trans-Neptunian panic zone, magnetogap, US Census Bureau Solar System statistical boundary, Kuiper gauntlet, Oort void, and crystal sphere holding the fixed stars.

It's hard to fit in the backseat of my flying car with my android Realdoll when we're both wearing jetpacks.

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.

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

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

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

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

I searched my .bash_history for the line with the highest ratio of special characters to regular alphanumeric characters, and the winner was: cat out.txt | grep -o "[[(].*[])][^)]]*$" ... I have no memory of this and no idea what I was trying to do, but I sure hope it worked.

Also, is it just me, or do Japan and New Zealand look suspiciously similar? Has anyone seen them at a party together?

'Pour one out for precipitation data integrity,' I say, solemnly upending the glass into the rain gauge.

Doug's cousin, the one from London, runs a Bumble love cult.

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.

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

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

Mile High Club membership [✓] [ ] Discovery of parts of Amelia Earhart's skeleton [ ] [ ] Mid-flight incident that results in safe landing on the Hudson River [✓] [ ]

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

There's also a +1 sometimes, which is there to keep everyone on their toes. In the future, people who got to pick cool numbers by signing up for Google Voice early will be revered as wizards.

If physics had a mafia, I'm pretty sure the BICEP2 mess would have ended in bloodshed.

I may have also tossed one of a pair of teleportation rings into the ocean, with interesting results.

'The Return of the Boomerang' would make a great movie title.

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

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

It's fun to watch browsers fumblingly recapitulate the history of window management. Someday we'll have xmonad as a Firefox extension.

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

You make forgetting look so easy.

In my reboot, Dennis the Menace was just trying to send Mr. Wilson a nice comet, but accidentally wiped out his dinosaur garden.

I THINK EVERYONE INVOLVED HERE IS CUTE.

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

Donate now to help us find a cure for causality. No one should have to suffer through events because of other events.

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

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

Charles, I just talked to John and Mildred, who run that company selling seeds and nuts, and their kids with MOUTHS are starving!

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!'

And sometimes I use it to retaliate against the guy upstairs with the loud girlfriend and the elliptical dish.

The other great lakes are just water on the far side of Canada Island. If you drive north from the Pacific northwest you actually cross directly into Alaska, although a few officials--confused by the Mercator distortion--have put up border signs.

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

There was no alt-text until you moused over

As a first step, they can put in a secondary deck, to help drivers try it out and find out how fun the jumps are. After a while no one will use the old flat deck and they can remove it.

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

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

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

When putting his kids to bed, after saying 'Goodnight', Obama has to stop himself from saying 'God bless you, and God bless the United States of America.'

When the results are published, no one will be sure whether to report on them again.

It seems wrong that Fruit by the Foot is only sold by weight or by number of rolls.

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

'Garbage In, Garbage Out' should not be taken to imply any sort of conservation law limiting the amount of garbage produced.

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

Also no results: 1girl10000cups, 2girls(5+3i)cups, 65536girls65536cups, or 3frenchhens2turtledoves1cup.

Roger Ebert once called you directionless and unwatchable.

I need a lawn, so I can yell at kids to stay off it.

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

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.

ALERT: Some pending mandatory software updates require version 21.1.2 of the Oracle/Sun Java(tm) JDK(tm) Update Manager Runtime Environment Meta-Updater, which is not available for your platform.

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

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

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

Luckily, the damages were partly offset by the prize money we got from accidentally winning the nearby water skiing championship tournament.

As far as "being in the pocket of Big Egg" goes, I think the real threat is Chansey.

Kenneth Arrow hated me because the ordering of my preferences changes based on which voting systems have what level of support. But it tells me a lot about the people I'm going to be voting with!

Sequoia Brussels sprouts are delicious but it's pretty hard to finish one.

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.

( MSTE ( AR ) CD )

The typical internet user (who wants to share) has an IQ of 147 and a 9-inch penis. Well, better than the reverse, I guess.

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.

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

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

Statistics suggest that there should be tons of alien encounter stories, and in practice there are tons of alien encounter stories. This is known as Fermi's Lack-of-a-Paradox.

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

'If you're done being pedantic, we should get dinner.' 'You did it again!' 'No, I didn't.'

Yes, I mean she said that during sex. Yes, it was a little weird.

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

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

It's not my fault I haven't had a chance to measure the curvature of this particular universe.

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

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.

Every age: "I'm glad I'm not the clueless person I was five years ago, but now I don't want to get any older."

Inigo/Buttercup 4eva <3

This PSA brought to you by several would-be assassins who tried to wave me in front of speeding cars in the last month and who will have to try harder next time.

PYTHON FLAG ENABLE THREE LAWS

We actually reached the future about three years ago.

'The sad thing is that I just wanted to talk about your poor smoke-bomb techniques.'

Feynman recounted another good one upperclassmen would use on freshmen physics students: When you look at words in a mirror, how come they're reversed left to right but not top to bottom? What's special about the horizontal axis?

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

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

Things are looking good for the eclipse--Nate Silver says Earth will almost definitely still have a moon in August.

[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!

Inside is a third box, labeled DO NOT OPEN UNLESS YOU ARE IN THE TIME ZONE WHERE YOU OPENED BOTH PREVIOUS BOXES.

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

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

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.

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

Chuck Jones is a vengeful god.

Science joke. You should probably just move along.

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

For sentimental reasons, every active Mars rover is counted as one person, although that's not enough to make Mars more than a dot.

Another thing that is a bad problem is if you're flying toward space and the parts start to fall off your space car in the wrong order. If that happens, it means you won't go to space today, or maybe ever.

Earth's r_jf is approximately 1.5 light-days, leading to general relativity's successful prediction that all the frogs in the Solar System should be found collected on the surface of the Earth.

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

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

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

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.

I understand it's hard to do more than 300 feet on these 90-second rush jobs, but with a smaller ramp I'm worried the gee forces will be too high for me to do any tricks.

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

Anyway, that's a common misconception. Geese live for a long time; all the ones we can see will probably keep flying around for billions of years before they explode.

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.'

People looking for the gaps in our understanding where the meaning of consciousness or free will might hide often turn to quantum uncertainty or infinite cosmologies, as if we don't have breathtakingly complex emergent phenomena right there in our freezers.

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

Once they selected the other proposal, we could have kept shopping ours around, but we would had to modify it include an aqueduct over their canal, which would be totally unreasonable.

Ok, plan B: Fly a kite into the blades, with a rock in a sling dangling below it, and create the world's largest trebuchet.

But then she does that thing with her tongue and I remember why I left you.

When an Ur guy / sells Nanni things / but the copper's bad, / He simply records his complaint for all time / "I got a bad deal / I'm maaaaad"

Well, for some value of 'actually work'.

Reductio ad absurdum fails when reality is absurd.

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.

I went to a dinner where there was a full 10 minutes of Holy Grail quotes exchanged, with no context, in lieu of conversation. It depressed me badly.

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

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

I hear Steven Levitt is writing a book analyzing A.J. Jacobs' quest to spend a year reading everything Malcolm Gladwell ever wrote. The audiobook will be narrated by Robert Krulwich of Radiolab.

I don't get it. The peak acceleration for passengers was WAY lower than in the giant-waterslide-loop-the-loop incident the other cruise line fired me for.

Fire is actually a potential biosignature, since it means something is filling the atmosphere with an unstable gas like oxygen. If we find a planet covered in flames, it might be an indicator that it supports life. Or used to, anyway, before the fire.

At my OLD school, we used Microsoft Encarta 2005.

"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..."

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

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

I built a model that combines local case rates and vaccination stats to estimate when it's reasonable to attend various types of party, but I forgot to include anything about where to find them.

For the moment it's a standoff

Supercollider? I 'ardly know 'er!

Wow, rude of you to regift literally every gift that you or anyone else has ever received.

This image stays roughly in sync with the day (assuming the Earth continues spinning). Shortcut: xkcd.com/now

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

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

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

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)

Don't click on the wing.

People into masturbatory navel-gazing have a lot to learn about masturbation.

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

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

The problem with perspective is that it's bidirectional.

But one of the regulars in the channel is a girl!

Thanks to differences in logging regulations, the messages actually turned out to be visible from the air.

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

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

Ok, but make sure to get lots of pieces of rock, because later we'll decide to stay in a room on our regular orb and watch hammers hold themselves and hit rocks for us, and they won't bring us very many rocks.

If at least one person has a nightmare about being swarmed by hundreds of mouse-sized dromaeosaurids, my work will have been done.

I didn't even know I *had* the Monty Python 'Lumberjack' song.

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.

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

I don't care what the research says. Everybody knows you should drink 3,000 glasses of water a day and change your oil every 8 miles.

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.

[other side] If the first word of an instruction you're given starts with the same letter as your crush's name, for that step imagine the experimenter is your crush.

Proper User Policy apparently means Simon Says.

Collaborative editing can quickly become a textual rap battle fought with increasingly convoluted invocations of U+202a to U+202e.

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

Things are rarely just crazy enough to work, but they're frequently just crazy enough to fail hilariously.

"The committee appreciates that your 2020 launch is on track, but the 'human capital/personnel retention' budget includes a lot more unmarked cash payments than usual. What are th--" "Public outreach."

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.

Also in the right quadrant are NFPA-compliant chemical manufacturers and Sir Charles Wheatstone. Sharing the top with the internet libertarians are Nate Silver and several politically-active kite designers.

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.

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.

It's like the squirt bottle we use with the cat.

The worst is the Terrible Twos, when they're always throwing things and shrieking, "forsooth, to bed thou shalt not take me, cur!"

To picture 10^18, just picture 10^13, but then imagine you connect the left side of the 3 to close off the little bays.

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

Works for any grocery or non-grocery. Even thyme is just H and time.

Tau Ceti is farther away, so it took me 36 years to start the war over updog.

PERPETUALLY OPTIMISTIC CASE: Early in the execution, our research group makes a breakthrough on proving P=NP.

We didn't actually land on the moon -- it just looked like we did because of precession. Also, gyroscopes caused 9/11.