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

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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.

Reductio ad absurdum fails when reality is absurd.

Squinting at a graph is fine for getting a rough idea of the answer, but if you want to pretend to know it exactly, you need statistics.

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

There were traffic jams for the eclipses in 1970 and 1979, and that was *before* we had the potential for overnight viral social media frenzies.

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

It can be expensive to hire a professional spectroscopist for your wedding, but the quality of the spectra you get is worth it.

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

Things were better before the Structuring and the Levels.

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

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

Proof of Zermelo's well-ordering theorem given the Axiom of Choice: 1: Take S to be any set. 2: When I reach step three, if S hasn't managed to find a well-ordering relation for itself, I'll feed it into this wood chipper. 3: Hey, look, S is well-ordered.

The establishment doesn't take us seriously. You know who else they didn't take seriously? Hitler. I'll be like him, but a GOOD guy instead of...

Are you ok? Do you need help?

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

'Well, no further questions. You're hired!' 'Oh, sorry! I'm no longer interested. There's a bunch of future I gotta go check out!'

Inigo/Buttercup 4eva <3

Gonna feel even dumber when I realize that all this time he's been talking into a bluetooth thingy and we're not actually friends.

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.

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

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

You know what really helps an existential crisis? Wondering how much shelf space to leave for a Terry Pratchett collection.

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.

I plugged in this lamp and my dog went rigid, spoke a sentence of perfect Akkadian, and then was hurled sideways through the picture window. Even worse, it's one of those lamps where the switch is on the cord.

You can search it if you want, but you may want to skip the memories of your mom.

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

I am never going out to buy an air conditioner with my sysadmin again.

People keep trying to come up with reasons that we should worry about the magnetic field collapsing or reversing, but honestly I think it's fine. Whatever minor problems it causes will be made up for by the mid-latitude auroras.

It's not our fault we caught a group on their way home from a geography bee. And they taught us that Uzbekistan is one of the world's two doubly-landlocked countries!

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

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

The most awkward part is when you have to pause to put on your shoes before you continue rolling out the door.

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.

I love the idea here, though of course it's not a great-quality drawing or scan.

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

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

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.

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

To anyone I've taken on a terrible date, this is retroactively my cover story.

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

Maybe I should've tried Wexler?

Are you still there, server? It's me, Margaret.

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

The days of the week are Monday, Arctic, Wellesley, Green, Electra, Synergize, and the Seventh Seal.

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

Wait, what?

Except in reality crossing a stream of marshmallows would create a giant Bill Murray.

'Does the substance feel weird to the touch?' is equally likely to get the answers 'Don't be ridiculous, you would never put your hand near a sample. We have safety protocols.' and 'Yeah, and it tastes AWFUL.'

A comic by my brother Doug, redrawn and rewritten by me

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.

Sorry, in SI units that's "there's a big football in there."

'At the stroke of midnight, your brother will be hurtling sideways at an altitude of 150 meters' is a regular physics prediction about your nonmagical trebuchet, whereas 'you are cursed to build a brother-launching trebuchet' falls out of the Lagrangian.

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

SUB[59]: The submission numbers for my accepted OEIS submissions in chronological order

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

It's cool how, when there's a number lots of people are curious about, but which isn't easy to measure, some random guess will get cited everywhere and become the universally quoted value. Unrelatedly, did you know there are 850 trillion waves in the ocean?

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

Completely implausible? Yes. Nevertheless, worth keeping a can of shark repellent next to the bed.

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

Thank you for making me feel less alone.

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

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

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

On the news a few days later: "Buzz is building around the so-called 'camping Roomba' after a big investment. Preorders have spiked, and..."

C'mon, ESA Solar Orbiter team, just give the Parker probe a LITTLE nudge at aphelion. Crash it into the sun. Fulfill the dream of Icarus. It is your destiny.

At first I thought I would need some gold or something to pay him, but then I realized that it was the 18th century and I could just bring a roll of aluminum foil.

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

After reading Slashdot and BoingBoing, sometimes I have to go outside.

The fact that things like the npm left-pad incident are so rare is oddly reassuring.

100he100k out th1s 1nno5at4e str1ng en100o501ng 15e been 500e5e50op1ng! 1t's 6rtua100y perfe100t! ...hang on, what's a "virtuacy"?

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

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.

'Wait, our state has mail voting. The forms are literally on the kitchen table.' 'Not now, I'm busy researching which channels have sharks in them.'

And then do it again in a moment now that they're out of Star Power

Sometimes, you have to sacrifice pieces to gain the advantage. Sometimes, to advance ... you have to fall back.

Several of the guests are secretly playing Meta Board Game Party. Every minute of parallel debate in the breakaway faction earns double victory points!

Dear editors of Homeopathy Monthly: I have two small corrections for your July issue. One, it's spelled "echinacea", and two, homeopathic medicines are no better than placebos and your entire magazine is a sham.

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

She also starts every letter with "Dear Future <your name>".

The universe is probably littered with the one-planet graves of cultures which made the sensible economic decision that there's no good reason to go into space--each discovered, studied, and remembered by the ones who made the irrational decision.

'--> [ Well, this is embarrassing. ] <--'

First person to bring me Wayne Coyne in a hamster ball gets a free t-shirt! He gets one too.

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

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

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

And the ten minutes striking up a conversation with that strange kid in homeroom sometimes matters more than every other part of high school combined.

When Vera Menchik entered a 1929 tournament, a male competitor mocked her by suggesting that a special 'Vera Menchik Club' would be created for any player who lost to her. When the tournament began, he promptly became the first member of said club, and over the years it accumulated a large and illustrious roster.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

If you want to see true audacity, do an image search for 'Altoona-style pizza.'

â€œIf you can read this, congratulationsâ€”the archive youâ€™re using still knows about the mouseover textâ€!

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

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

So I'm a bad person.

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

Merge branch 'asdfasjkfdlas/alkdjf' into sdkjfls-final

Researchers just found the gene responsible for mistakenly thinking we've found the gene for specific things. It's the region between the start and the end of every chromosome, plus a few segments in our mitochondria.

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

Each particle also has a password which allows its properties to be changed, but the cosmic censorship hypothesis suggests we can never observe the password itself—only its secure hash.

Of course in reality this is just a US/UK thing; in British English, 'fall' is the brief period in between and 'autumn' is the main season.

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

When comparing hypotheses with Bayesian methods, the similar 'clickbayes factor' can account for some harder-to-quantify priors.

Later renouncing clickbait, Einstein called his inclusion of cosmological content in general relativity the biggest blunder of his career.

Awww.

Give a man a fish, or he will destroy the only existing vial of antidote.

I think of myself as the David Attenborough of factory mailing equipment.

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

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

'Taft in a wet t-shirt contest' is the key image here.

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

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

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.

I think I see a Mandelbrot set! No, that's just blood splatters. Golly.

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

"The only link we've found between the two documents is that a fragment of the Noah one mentions Aaron's brother Moses parting an ocean. Is that right?" "... yes. Yes, exactly."

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

What if what *I* see as blue, *you* see as a slightly different blue because you're using Chrome instead of Firefox and despite a decade of messing with profiles we STILL can't get this right somehow.

According to a new paper published in the journal Science, reporters are unable to thrive in an arsenic-rich environment.

It's a lasing cat-vity!

IATA stands for International AirporT Abbreviation.

At least if you're really into, like, Turkish archaeology, store clerks aren't like 'hey, how 'bout those Derinkuyu underground cities!' when they're trying to be polite.

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

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

The 538TR attempts to capture a player's combined skill at basketball (either real-life or NBA 2K18) and election forecasting.

It's pi plus C, of course.

It's hard to decide which simple machine system to invest in. DeWalt makes a great lever and inclined plane, but I hear Milwaukee's wheel-and-axles are really good.

You make forgetting look so easy.

ACCESS LIMITS: Clients may maintain connections to the server for no more than 86,400 seconds per day. If you need additional time, you may contact IERS to file a request for up to one additional second.

Benthic Santas weren't even discovered until the 1970s, but many scientists now believe Christmas may have originally developed around hydrothermal vents and only later migrated to the surface.

'Hello, Ghostbusters?' 'ooOOoooo people born years after that movie came out are having a second chiiiild right now ooOoooOoo'

But I've made $13.72 already today! Ow, stop throwing pennies.

It's a long way down.

Under quantum tax law, photons sent through a beamsplitter don't actually choose which path they took, or incur a tax burden, until their wavefunction collapses when the power is sold.

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

And even when they're not distracted, they usually get kicked out for illegal under-the-net 'subduction spikes'.

Astronomy (or "astrology" in British English) is the study of ...

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

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

This project actually inspired a two-hour powerpoint presentation that Al Gore gave around the country.

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.

Juraaaassic Park, Juraaaassic Park, God shed his grace on theeeee

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

Controls are a little hard to figure out.

The only winning move is to play, perfectly, waiting for your opponent to make a mistake.

When you worry that you're missing out on something by not making both choices simultaneously by quantum superposition, that's called phomo.

There's still a chance you were conceived via IVF. But we've checked your mom's college yearbook photos, and whether or not she and your father had sex, it's clear that ... listen, I know this is hard for you.

I always figured the word 'blog' would sound *less* silly as the years went by.

The test didn't (spoiler alert) destroy the world, but the fact that they were even doing those calculations makes theirs the coolest jobs ever.

This white-balance illusion hit so hard because it felt like someone had been playing through the Monty Hall scenario and opened their chosen door, only to find there was unexpectedly disagreement over whether the thing they'd revealed was a goat or a car.

But listen, if getting your car out from under the pile is REALLY important to you, we do have an axe you can borrow.

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

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

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

Gotten the Ferris wheel operator's attention

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

It's early 2020. The entire country is gripped with Marco Rubio fever except for Alaska, which is freaking out. You're frantically studying up on etiquette and/or sexting.

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

Plus, when someone finally grabs your glasses and stomps on them, it costs way less than $1,500 to replace them.

"Symbolic integration" is when you theatrically go through the motions of finding integrals, but the actual result you get doesn't matter because it's purely symbolic.

"We TOLD you it was hard." "Yeah, but now that I'VE tried, we KNOW it's hard."

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

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.

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

"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.

Romantic comedy heroines, I'm talking to you.

Ever notice how there aren't as many thunderstorms now as there were when you were a kid? Much like 'the shuffle on my MP3 player has a bias', this is occasionally true but universally believed. Brains are so interesting!

Later, when I remember that I'm calling movers, I frantically scribble over the labels and write 'NORMAL HOUSE STUFF' on all of them, which actually makes things worse.

Prank #11: Boston

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

'If you've eliminated a few possibilities and you can't think of any others, your weird theory is proven right' isn't quite as rhetorically compelling.

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

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

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

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

Cue letters from anthropology majors complaining that this view of numerolinguistic development perpetuates a widespread myth. They get to write letters like that because when you're not getting a real science degree you have a lot of free time. Zing!

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

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.

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.

At least people who make religious predictions of the apocalypse have an answer to the question 'Why didn't you predict any of the other ones that happened recently?'

Someone bring me a pocket fan so I can drift around the yard.

'Big Data' doesn't just mean increasing the font size.

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

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.

It's much better than the other one.

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

You can arrange a pickup of your sword in Rivendell between the hours of noon and 7:00 PM.

The top search for every state is PORN, except Florida, where it's SEX PORN.

Sure, this exoplanet we discovered may seem hostile to life, but our calculations suggest it's actually in the accretion disc's habitable zone.

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.

The typical Shadow Biology Department is housed in a building coated in a thin layer of desert varnish which renders it invisible to normal-world university staff.

Briefly set a new record for tallest human-made structure by getting my knit sweater snagged on the skydiving plane door as I jumped and not noticing until I'd landed.

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.

Presented in partnership with Qualcomm, Craigslist, Whirlpool, Hostess, LifeStyles, and the US Chamber of Commerce. Manufactured on equipment which also processes peanuts. Price includes 2-year Knicks contract. Phone may extinguish nearby birthday candles. If phone ships with Siri, return immediately; do not speak to her and ignore any instructions she gives. Do not remove lead casing. Phone may attract/trap insects; this is normal. Volume adjustable (requires root). If you experience sudden tingling, nausea, or vomiting, perform a factory reset immediately. Do not submerge in water; phone will drown. Exterior may be frictionless. Prolonged use can cause mood swings, short-term memory loss, and seizures. Avert eyes while replacing battery. Under certain circumstances, wireless transmitter may control God.

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

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.

[As security is dragging me away] "Come on, at least I didn't make the mistake in the other direction!"

Sometimes, I sit on top of parking decks and watch the sun rise. I feel like I should have a guitar or something.

No other experiment has a lower false negative rate.

I mean, we already live in a world of flying robots killing people. I don't worry about how powerful the machines are, I worry about who the machines give power to.

I know they said this change is permanent, but surely when they hear how much we're complaining someone will find a way to change things back.

I heard the general anesthesia drugs can cause amnesia, so when I woke up mid-extraction I started taking notes on my hand so I'd remember things later. I managed 'AWAKE BUT EVERYTHING OK' before the dental assistant managed to find and confiscate all my pens.

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

There's been a raccoon accident at an accordion bacchanalia! Double doses!

You know, pep rallies weirded me out in high school, and they've only gotten creepier in retrospect.

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

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

It me, your father.

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

* Mad about jorts

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

All I want is a secure system where it's easy to do anything I want. Is that so much to ask?

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.

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

I WONDERED why he kept asking whether we thought the impact speed was too low.

The SpaceX system carefully guides falling phones down to the surface, a process which the phones increasingly often survive without exploding.

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

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

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

Yes you are! And you're sitting there! Hi, kitty!

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

Every time you read this mouseover, toggle between interpreting nested footnotes as footnotes on footnotes and interpreting them as exponents (minus one, modulo 6, plus 1).

A good ²³⁸Umbrella policy should cover it.

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.

Thank you to the xkcd April 1st volunteers/commentators, including @Chromakode, Kevin, @Aiiane, Patrick, Kat, Reuven, @cotrone, @bstaffin, @zigdon, schwal, Stereo, and everyone who voted!

By the third trimester, there will be hundreds of babies inside you.

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.

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

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

If the breaking news is about an event at a hospital or a lab, move it all the way over to the right.

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

I learned from Achewood that since this poem is in ballad meter, it can be sung to the tune of Gilligan's Island. Since then, try as I might, I haven't ONCE been able to read it normally.

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

The Wirecutter staff called the Herman Miller Siege Perilous "the most cursed product we've ever had to fight" and "nearly as immortal as it boasts."

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

The tumbleweed then tried to roll off into the sunset, but due to the Old West's placement north of the subtropical ridge, the prevailing winds were in the wrong direction.

On Mondays I go running, so you'll have to get up early and follow along on a parallel street. What fun!

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

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

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.

Water/ice has a lot of weird phases. Maybe asking 'where do birds go when it rains' is like asking 'where does Clark Kent go whenever Superman shows up?'

"So what's dark energy?" "Cosmologists and the FDA are both trying very hard to find out."

[hair in face] "SEVVVENNN YEEEARRRSSS"

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.

News networks giving a greater voice to viewers because the social web is so popular are like a chef on the Titanic who, seeing the looming iceberg and fleeing customers, figures ice is the future and starts making snow cones.

This rumpled fabric at the corner looks like evidence of ongoing tectonic activity.

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

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

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

58% of the state has gone into plaid.

Man, this trick has saved me so many times.

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

Cats can be smaller than the critical limit, but they're unobservable. If one shrinks enough that it crosses the limit, it just appears to get cuter and cuter as it slowly fades from view.

In Rio de Janeiro in 2016, the same jump will get an athlete 0.25% higher (>1cm) than in London four years prior.

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

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

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

I just noticed CVS has started stocking homeopathic pills on the same shelves with--and labeled similarly to--their actual medicine. Telling someone who trusts you that you're giving them medicine, when you know you’re not, because you want their money, isn’t just lying--it’s like an example you’d make up if you had to illustrate for a child why lying is wrong.

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

I recently learned something that solved a mystery that had bugged me since childhood--why, when I looked at an analog clock, the hand would sometimes seem to take a couple seconds to start ticking. Google "stopped clock illusion".

Type IIII error: Mistaking tally marks for Roman numerals

[desperately] Maybe this is from some country where they use commas as decimal points, and also as digit separators after the decimal, and also use random other characters for decoration???

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.

Elon Musk finally blocked me from the internal Tesla repository because I wouldn't stop sending pull requests for my code supporting steering via vim keybindings.

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.

Effect strength => [unstoppable] | Effect range => [2 miles] | Effect duration => [1 year]

I have never been as self-conscious about my handwriting as when I was inking in the caption for this comic.

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]

Too good not to happen.

This is true. The lyrics are ridiculous.

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

'Hey! Put her down!' 'No, it's ok! The next chance for me to be carried to a blood cauldron isn't until 2024!'

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

Ontology is way off to the left and geography is way off to the right.

Earth clearly hasn't been inspected, since it's definitely contaminated with salmonella.

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

Roundly-condemned headlinese initiative shuttered indefinitely.

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

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

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

The last band of color indicates the snake's tolerance for being held before biting.

I would subscribe to a Twitter feed that supplied you with one reasonable sports opinion per day, like 'The Red Sox can't make the playoffs (championship games), but in last night's game their win seriously damaged the chances of the Yankees (longstanding rival team).'

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

Does the screeching chill your blood and herald death? If yes, banshee. If no, seagull.

I wonder what year I'll discard the last weird food item that I bought online in early 2020.

Ingress: Foursquare With Space Noises.

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

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.

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

[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)."

Wait, this is space -- how are you talking to me? And, as an afterthought, what's up with the hole in reality?

[later] I can't believe how bad corruption has become, especially given that our league split off from the statewide one a month ago SPECIFICALLY to protest this kind of flagrantly biased judging.

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

This plan may sound appealing to people who know a little about the immune system, but the drawbacks are clear to people who know a lot about the immune system and also to people who don't know anything about it.

A person with two watches is never sure what time it is, especially if I got them one of the watches.

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

This discovery was key to his demonstration of regular/goofy symmetry violation, which won him gold in the theory portion of the X Games.

Since buns range from crepuscular to nocturnal, it's recommended that you enable the scheduled "Do Not Disturb" mode on your phone to avoid being woken by alerts about Night Buns.

It's *almost* enough to make me want to redo high school.

The best camera is the one at L2.

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

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.

This one makes me wince every time I think about it

"So, like, sexy news videos?" "No, people have tried that--it's still just video content. We need to actually inform people THROUGH making out. I would call it 'Mouth Content,' but I think that's already the title of a Neil Cicierega album."

A video can have a log scale that's misaligned with both the time AND space axes.

He probably just poops over the side of the sleigh.

$We didn't even get to the continued fractions!$

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

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.

[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."

When Galileo dropped two weights from the Leaning Tower of Pisa, they put him in the history books. But when I do it, I get 'detained by security' for 'injuring several tourists.'

'This space intentionally left blank' is less immediately provocative but more Hofstadterially confusing.

There are also a lot of global versions of this map showing traffic to English-language websites which are indistinguishable from maps of the location of internet users who are native English speakers.

Somewhere in the world, my actual grandmothers are reading this and angrily exclaiming that I never write even malformed thank-you notes. DEAR GRANDMOMS: I AM SORRY! YOU ARE WONDERFUL PEOPLE AND THANK YOU FOR EVERYTHING. LOVE reddit.com RANDALL.

A helicopter bursts from a chrysalis and alights on a rock, rotors still damp.

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!

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

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

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

You're a turtle!

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

The key to discovering life on Mars is to find someone who built a camera and landed it on Mars. Then you just look through the pictures for plants and dogs and stuff.

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

Sweet unintersecting dreams!

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

Hey, golf balls float on lava, so this should make recovering them from the hazards easier.

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

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 ...

I guess it's also the right setting for pictures of the Moon at night.

Once the air from the top passes below the plane of the wing and catches sight of the spooky skulls, it panics, which is the cause of turbulent vortices.

And yet I have no trouble believing that the start of the 2016 election was several decades ago.

Your IDE's color may vary.

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

June 21st, 365, the date of the big Mediterranean earthquake and tsunami, lived in infamy for a few centuries before fading. Maybe the trick is a catchy rhyme; the '5th of November' thing is still going strong over 400 years later.

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

Nothing personal, high schoolers.

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

Welcome to the International Space Station Exclamation Point!

Bugs are spin 1/2 particles, unless it's particularly windy.

We're adding some industrial flypaper to minimize reflection or scattering of customers who might complain.

David did this

"Do you feel like the answer depends on whether you're currently in the hole, versus when you refer to the events later after you get out? Assuming you get out."

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

I'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.

'No, my cabbage moths have already started laying eggs in them! Send the trolley into the river!' 'No, the sailing wolf will steal the boat to rescue them!'

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

The IAU is sad to announce that at 00:39 UTC on December 22nd, Jupiter and Saturn did unfortunately come into contact, and appear to have blooped together.

The Greeks long suspected this, but it wasn't until April 12th of 1882 that Ferdinand von Lindemann conclusively proved it when he constructed himself the most awesome birthday party possible and nobody showed up.

It also helps with negotiation. "Look, if it were up to me, *I'd* accept your offer, but my swarm of autonomous killer cells literally can't be reasoned with. It's out of my hands!"

1. Flatten the curve. 2. Steepen the curve. 3. Hang out.

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

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

We should probably talk about this before the wedding.

Positive vibes/longitudes only

Strictly speaking, 'violin' refers to the internal structure of the data. The external portion visible in the plot is called the 'viola.'

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.

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

I mean, the black-and-white stuff was running backward, but it hardly mattered to the story.

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

YEEEEEEAAAAAAHHHHHH!

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

Now I'm tempted to start telling people that I secretly don't actually know how to do any physics calculations, and so all the answers in What If are based on me actually trying to do the thing and then reporting what happened, but phrased as if it's hypothetical.

I really shouldn't abuse that power so heavily.

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

And I was kicked out of my March Madness pool because I wouldn't shut up about the evidence for NBA/ABA endosymbiosis.

$1600 / 1386153BR 3BATH, MODERN SLIDING DOORS, GUEST ROOMS, GARBAGE DISPOSAL. FREE MANDATORY PARKING (ENFORCED). CONVENIENT TO ALDERAAN.

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

There's a compromise bill to keep the notification bar but at least charge the battery.

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.

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

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

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!

Speed limit c arcminutes^2 per steradian

President Andrew Johnson once said, "If I am to be shot at, I want Gnome Ann to be in the way of the bullet."

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."

According to my especially unsupervised K-means clustering algorithm, there are currently about 8 billion types of people in the world.

Joke's on you--the Roomba and I had a LOVELY evening.

Most properties can only boast INDOOR heated floors.

Contains 100% of your recommended daily allowance!

You will live on forever in our hearts, pushing a little extra blood toward our left hands now and then to give them a squeeze.

With the right 90-degree rotation, any effect is a side effect.

[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!

[earlier] "Your vintage-style handmade chest business is struggling. But I have a plan."

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

We live in a world where there are actual fleets of robot assassins patrolling the skies. At some point there, we left the present and entered the future.

I tried to train an AI to repair my Python environment but it kept giving up and deleting itself.

No, a hydroplane doesn't land on water--that's an aquaplane. A hydroplane is a plane that gets electric power from an onboard water reservoir with a tiny dam and turbines.

I love the title-text!

This isn't an informational illustration; this is a thing I think we should do. First, we'll need a gigantic spool of thread. Next, we'll need some kind of ... hmm, time to head to Seattle.

I used to do this all the time.

Update: I've been banned from the physics department for the way I pronounce "Doppler effect."

I average out the spring and fall changes and just set my clocks 39 minutes ahead year-round.

Alexa defeated her in a battle hinging on the ability to set multiple timers.

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

1. Nf3 ... ↘↘↘ 2. Nc3 ... ↘↘↘ 0-1